Speech therapy

Today I thought I'd describe what Ramsy does at his speech therapy sessions.  We go about once a week to see a very sweet speech-language pathologist (also referred to as an SPL) who, although she is very kind, does not let Ramsy off the hook!  Her goal is to at least maintain his current speaking abilities, and hopefully to improve them over time.  Although the tumor has caused disruptions in Ramsy's expressive language capacities, and the neural pathways that retrieve words don't work anymore, it is possible- through diligent long-term practice- to form new pathways so that his brain will be able to come up with those words more automatically.  It's like physiotherapy for the brain instead of muscles.

Some of the things we work on to help him exercise his grey matter include:

• naming the opposite of a given word (easy!)
• naming a synonym for a given word (harder)
• identifying a common characteristic of items in a list (What do puck, net, and mask have in common?  They are all hockey equipment.)
• adding an appropriate item to a list of related items
• listing 5 items in a certain category (Things in a Kitchen, or Restaurants, or Flavours of Chips.  This is the most difficult activity for Ramsy because his mind ping-pongs all over the category and has trouble settling on one word.)

We usually have a good laugh at least once per practice session because Ramsy likes to be very creative in his responses.  The SPL had no idea what Ramsy was saying when he gave "Jai Alai" as an answer in the Sports category!  Or another day he gave me "Hockey, hockey, hockey, hockey and ... hockey!" as his 5 sports.  (You may have noticed the hockey theme in this post. We're watching Game 4. Go Canucks!)  

Even though we have fun, it's not at all easy for Ramsy to work on this every day.  I'm so proud of him.  Love looking after him!