Therapy Team 5: Games for Free

My function with John's therapy was three-fold. Most importantly, I became his coach when we were away from the professional therapists, whom I call Angels. At home, in the car, anywhere we were with a moment of free time: we worked incessantly. As time went on, we got more and more creative with our methods of home-therapy-for-free.

The free aspect of this therapy is only in that we did not have to spend dollars out of our pocket to pay other professionals for this help. In fact, I attribute the remarkable results of John's speaking success to our constant games and homework that we did outside of the mere three hours a week with a speech pathologist. Our willingness to be a team and work constantly made the difference. 

We developed an entire series of games we played, that cost nothing, that provided constant speech therapy. One of those games was for me to trace a word with my finger on the dash of our pickup truck as we were on the road to somewhere. It was John’s job to read the invisible word I had traced and say that word. 

This task was quite challenging for him. Mentally, it involves observing what I wrote [mostly simple three or four letter words], being able to assemble the invisible letters and recall what I wrote, and then being able to speak that word. For a brain damaged person that is a monumental chain of tasks that have to be connected in order to be successful. We were not only developing language, we were developing concentration, assembly, and ultimately the ability to recite what he saw. 

When we first started this game, I would start with words of items that were in the car. For example, I would trace the letters K-E-Y on the dashboard. John would be confused because he could not assemble the letters - it involved re-training his short term memory, too. Much of that had been lost in the stroke. By the time I wrote the second letter, he had forgotten the first one. He would look at me, confused, unable to complete the task. 

I would trace the letters again. If he still did not get the word after the third or fourth try, I would point to the key in the ignition. Then I would trace the letters again. The light would go on in his head and he would say “KEY”. He was so proud of his success. He had connected the visual aspect of the actual key to the invisible letters I traced on the dash. We played this game regularly in the car for years after the stroke. 

In fact, everyone once in a while, twenty three years later, I will suddenly state, “John, what’s this word?” and trace something on the dash of the car. It is no longer a daily ritual, but as a surprise game, we laugh at the silliness of this game. 

This laughter brings us great joy. 

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I cannot emphasize enough, the benefits of laughter between John and I. It not only breaks up our intense moments of frustration when he can not say what he wants to say, but it also heals our pain. We are extraordinarily lucky that our struggle to have conversations rarely breaks down into anger. I attribute that to two things: one, our ability to laugh at ourselves. Second, we have learned to let go of the frustration and simply walk away from that conversation. It is a behavior pattern that serves us.

Often we will try again on the same topic later and we will be successful at discovering what it was that John was trying to say. Those moments bring us great joy for another small success. 

 2014 Nancy Weckwerth