the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

130 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance:
In the original stroke twenty-five years ago, I lost both
expressive language and the supporting syntax of daily life
activity. The loss of life syntax was language-related: planning,
communicating, and executing intent and goals were all affected.
In the process, however, I gained art, a mystical mind, and vast
non-word relationships in the journey.
In this second event, the damage is to the sub-cortical cerebellum,
where some of the most basic integration of sensory-perceptual planning,
organization, and implementation of motor activity takes place. From the
outside I look reasonably coordinated, but internally I feel off balance and
very limited in multitasking across sensory-modalities. And I lost verbal
facility again.
I thought that the new damage was not related to the decline of my
speech, that my attention went necessarily to the damage of new limitations
and only secondarily to my expression. I learn from my neuropsychologist
that is only part of the story. The cerebellum is part of the old, primitive
brain, the first place where incoming information is organized. As such it
provides the most basic direction for both thought and action. So damage
in that area of my brain likely limited input into my higher cognitive/verbal
brain, accounting for feeling the enormous complexity and the great effort
of activities that formerly were simple.
While everything ultimately connects to the brain, my functional
disabilities this second time are in my body, motor and somatic, and less in
my cognitive mind. The subtle sensorimotor syntax for dancing, for karate,
for cleaning my bathroom, and for any other daily life task are now challenges
in my body. The sensations of difficulty in sensory-perceptual-motor
coordination and syntax in action feel quite different from the consciousness
of struggle in cognitive word planning.
The cerebellum, part of the animal mind, provides the basis of sensory
thinking. I function best now when I don’t think cognitively, when I don’t try