And all that jazz

So, I'm at Waterstreet (surprise, surprise) and I just overheard a group of coeds studying for a test of some sort.  It had some medical (neurological) component to it - they were discussing aphasia (a group of language disorders that occur after a stroke or traumatic brain injury).  Anyway, my brain ached because their definitions of aphasia were so simple.  I thought about going over to explain to them that in Broca's aphasia it's not just that your 'tongue is broken', but rather your brain is not able to tell your mouth how to form words with the ease it did before the stroke, and that Wernicke's aphasia was not 'a loss of short term memory', but rather, an inability to accurately process incoming acoustic stimuli, thus your speech production is a series of phonetically correct words but the message of the speech has been lost (that's why it's called empty speech - the message is not there anymore).  Alas, I decided to let sleeping dogs lie, and didn't correct them of their misnomers. 

In other news ... my supervisor was at a conference in Grand Rapids today, so I did therapy all by myself!  Everything went fine - nothing out of the ordinary (we did have two more emotional mini-breakdowns than usual, but nothing I couldn't handle).  Our afternoons are usually spent doing assistive technology stuff, but because Elizabeth wasn't here I went downstairs and "helped" Sarah. (Helped is in quotations because she doesn't need help, and by my being there I increased her work load, but I helped.  On the flip side, one of the kids Sarah worked with today had his best day ever - he was independently signing - something that hasn't happened yet!).  Sarah works with a young population that Elizabeth and I work with.  Our caseload consists of middle-high school aged kids with severe cognitive impairments.  Some of our students have some autistic traits, but no one with full blown autism (we're all on the spectrum a little bit anyway).  Sarah's caseload is a much younger crew: elementary aged kids.  The ones I saw today have more autistic traits than my students, so it was good and interesting to interact with them.

I have to say, that before coming to Croyden autism scared me.  I had never worked with anyone with autism, I had barely even seen what autism is like.  Having been here (and observed the severe cases of autism) I am no longer scared.  In fact - sometimes it's down right hilarious.  That may sound cruel, but when a child sees a toy they really like and they flex and extend their body so much they almost fall out of the chair it's really funny.  We use language and other linguistic acts to express our feelings, some of these children use large movements, and random vocalizations.  By the way, reverse phonation (making voice on the inhalation instead of the exhalation) sounds really crazy when a 7 year old boy does it.

Anyway, my phone is dead and I am expecting a phone call, so I should really go home and charge it.  Curses, I didn't want to leave this early.