I’ve spent countless hours working on my speech and the journey continues! In a few weeks, I will continue speech therapy with Miller Speech & Hearing at TCU. Once started, it will mark the 5th speech therapist I’ve worked with since my stroke in July 2022. In order to get a good idea of where I came from, here is a sample of my speech when I was at the Day Neuro Program at Baylor Scott & White in October of 2022:
December of 2022, I began working with my speech therapist through Collage Home & Community Rehabilitation Partners (Collage) and was taught about the 5 parameters of speech production and how it was important to work on each of these areas in order to improve my speech.
Respiration-breath support for speech production and voice loudness.
Phonation-voice/vocal cord vibration and pitch.
Articulation-speech, the movement of your articulators to form sounds and words.
Resonance-direction of the sound, nasal vs. oral.
Prosody-variation in your voice (pitch, inflection, stress, rate).
Other than resonance, I worked on all the other parameters of speech production each week during the course of my therapy. January of 2023, I began working with TCU on consonant blends while continuing my work with Collage. My work with Collage speech therapy included: diadochokinetic rate (rapid alternating movements of my articulators), maximum phonation duration (learning how to take deeper breaths and extend the /ah/ sound as long as I could), reading children’s books, using words from a children’s dictionary and constructing complete sentences with these words, using the voice tools app to measure volume, pitch, rate and so much more. After much hard work and practice…..
Here is what I sound like today:
My speech still has room for improvement, but now I can confidently say I’m much closer to sounding like old self. If my speech never returns fully, that is okay, I’m appreciative of the basic ability to communicate. Throughout this process, I’ve learned so much and encountered so many great hearts along the way!
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