the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

Tales from the Other Side of Language 135
In my experience, such patients are relieved, actually, when their sound
brain underneath the havoc they are experiencing is affirmed; then they can
begin to see the pre-stroke self and hold onto it. Alternatively, another patient
who had a cerebellar stroke liked the new, more assertive, aggressive brain
and chose to stay with the view of the damaged brain, and began to actualize
a changed sense of self.
As a clinician and developmentalist, I see brain recovery processes
over time. Patients like me come out of stroke or brain trauma in shock,
struggling to sort out what has happened to them, the damages, the
limitations. When the dust of shock settles, patients who can begin to work
out assessments for themselves. This is a transitional time excellent for
informative intervention.
Many of my hospital patients seem almost automatically to opt for
the familiar self and work with their limitations as just that, as I managed
to do. In the process of this intensive hospital-based rehabilitation, these
patients learn the importance of their own activity in their recovery and
leave the hospital having learned the basic realities of neuroplasticity. But
like the spunky irritable patient described before, many patients struggle
with erroneous messages from the damaged parts of their brains. For these
patients intervention to assert a shift in attention and awareness from the
damaged brain to the familiar can be effective. With that patient I was just as
crabby as she while she struggled with me. She knew I had been where she
was and therefore trusted my words.
In the time of my stroke and through the following surgery, I was acutely
aware of being nearly dead, so close, like a hair’s breadth, to being dead, and
I survived. To survive such a blow, even with damage and limitation, is an
open doorway, a possibility to look at life in a fundamentally different way,
to look at purpose and goals anew. Life energy and power reside in that open
place. Over time I found totally new perspectives on my life: death became
not fearsome but an ally living in my body, paradoxically promoting life,
enriching it.
The drawing and painting first were speech therapy, balancing left and