young survivors

Damage to Attention

If you have a right-side injury, your attention might be damaged. Your speech therapist will work with you to recover your focus.

Aphasia

Aphasia is an issue with your brain where you lack access to your words. If you have aphasia and struggle with words, you know what you want to say, but you can’t access the words in your head to pull it out and say it. This disorder has nothing to do with your ability to pronounce words, it only refers to your ability to access your language. Your speech therapist will work with you to regain access to your language. Aphasia occurs when the injury is in the side of your brain where the language is stored. If you are right-handed, that’s the left side of the brain. If you are left-handed, your language is on the right side of your brain.

Dysarthria

Dysarthria is slurred speech, many brain injury survivors struggle with slurred speech, your speech therapist will work with you on recovering your pronunciation. Initially, this will be super frustrating because people struggle to understand you but nurses won’t immediately offer a pencil to write down what you want to say since patients with aphasia can’t write in order to express their missing language. Not knowing what language disorder you were struggling with, the nurses won’t initially offer you a pencil. Some survivors recover normal speech except for a few specific shapes their mouth has to make. If this is the case for you, your speech will be totally normal until you come across a word that contains the sounds you struggle with.

Ataxia

Ataxia is a speech disorder where you have difficulty coordinating the muscles in your mouth to speak properly. It goes along with having trouble with breath support for your words, your family may mention that your voice sounds weaker than before your injury. It might wear you out to talk too much, feeling more like you’re doing cardio than just speaking. Your words might not flow evenly at the cadence you had before your injury, this will improve as your vocal chords strengthen.

Strengthening vocal cords can be done with exercises that require them to move rapidly and tightly like you feel during full laughter. This stroke survivor is struggling with ataxia, mmaking her speech sound labored annd awkward:

Spasticity

As your muscles fully wake up from paralysis, you’ll start to get super tight muscles pulling in. This is because your brain is confused on exactly how & where to send the signal to pull the muscle in, it is trying to hold together your muscles as it always has but is doing a very poor job of managing how tightly to pull in. All of your paralyzed muscles can struggle with spasticity/tone. Medication: there are medications for spasticity, they don’t always work for everyone. Some survivors report success with these medications Botox: Spasticity is frequently treated with Botox shots in your muscles that are trying too hard to pull in. Botox is a great treatment but there are some downsides to be aware of:

2. Pain: the shots can be very painful, your injector should use cold spray to slightly numb your skin right before injecting. If they aren’t numbing you, you might be at an unsafe injector, so we recommend finding a different provider.