Watched Dianne Sawyer’s excellent interview with Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly last night. I found it both inspiring and disturbing, and her struggles to communicate brought back memories of my dad.
My father’s first stroke left no obvious physical damage but it hit the area of his brain that stores nouns. He lost all the nouns in his vocabulary – that means all the names of everyone and everything he knew. It made communication extremely frustrating, to say the least. He never participated in any formal rehab program, but through sheer determination and constant reading he was eventually able to regain much of what he had lost.
Just two weeks after his stroke, Dad went back to work, and I went with him on his first service call.
The air conditioning had failed at a long-time customer, a bowling alley on North Shepherd. When we arrived, the manager tried to strike up a conversation, explaining when the a-c had gone out, what he thought was wrong, etc. Finally, Dad looked at him and said:
“I can’t …..TALK it……but I can …FIX it. Go away!”
He was right. He could.
While he worked on the compressor I explained to the manager what had happened. In less than an hour the manager and the bowling alley were cooled down and we were on our way back home.
No comments:
Post a Comment