Goal: Accomplished

So, I have reached a new level in my seasoned career of negative 30 days, a thesis, a giant test and a 9 month internship from being a certified speech-language pathologist: for the first time a patient has requested not to receive therapy from me because of my stutter.  One might say that this is an odd thing to call a goal to be accomplished.  Yet, I a logical and rational human being, realized there was a ticking bomb related to this. Ultimately, I knew, one day I would have a patient request not to work with me because I have a more difficult time speaking in a fluid stream of words than the rest of you "neuro-typicals" (I got that phrase from my friend Peter - awesome).  Honestly, I was quite pleased with the manner in which the situation was handled.  I was never offended and was not made to feel incompetent.  My supervisor reassured me that I am doing good work and none of our other patients had taken issue with it.  I assume the family spoke with my supervisor after hours.  My supervisor then came and spoke to me (this was last week, mind you) and she said that I have three options: 1) the other slp could treat the patient, 2) my supervisor could treat the patient and I could observe or 3) I could treat the patient if I were certain that I could use the therapy techniques and "control" my stuttering.

Anyway, all of this made the come to this realization: while I have dealt with my stuttering - the emotions (anxiety, fear) that accompany the social pressure to "talk good" that easily overwhelms even fluent speakers (let alone stutterers).  And while I have dealt with the physical aspects (not to say that I don't stutter, but that I have eliminated (most of) the secondary behaviors that accompany it, and for for the most part, my stutter does not interrupt or dictate my life).  I have given stuttering therapy, provided counseling (advice) for other stutterers.  Even through all of that there is still a little bit of me that considers my stuttering to be synonymous with an unsightly mole or character flaw that my friends/family must over look.  That somehow they (you) are doing me a favor by liking me.  Now, intellectually, I know this to be erroneous.  But "knowing" something and "believing" something are entirely different animals.  I think that I will carry the scar of "my unsightly stutter" forever.  I think that I will always beat back the feelings of insecurity that can accompany an awkward situation or a failed attempt at speaking fluently.  Nevertheless, life goes on, and I "know" that I will be a better speech-language pathologist because of my own struggle with communicating myself.  Eh, such is life - right?!?!?!?!?!?!

one midnight gone (well, a little more than one)

props to anyone who caught the Into the Woods reference.

Anyway, I got out of my internship a little early today (4:30), so I decided to pop into a coffee shop in downtown Battle Creek to do some homework, and what not.  So, here I am at Brownstone Coffee at 18.5 Michigan Ave in battle creek.  I was pleasantly surprised when I walked into the shop.  Initially, I did not expect to be impressed.  It's in Battle Creek, which doesn't bode well (Battle Creek, in general, just doesn't appeal to me).  Anyway.  I walked into the dimly lit, narrow, but exceedingly long shop, heard the soft blues/jazz music playing overhead and ordered my Americano from the barista, who was quite warm and friendly.  I found my way to one of the tables lining the left side of the shop, each individually lit by a light, alternating between mini torch lamps and "lawyer-style" desk lamps.  Across from me there are three circular glass tables with chairs that match the table support.  the chair backs all have steaming cups of coffee etched out of them.  - it adds a nice little bit.  Anyway, on the right wall there is a series of three murals, one of a Hindu god (with 8 arms - can't remember the name), another of a guy with a yellow trench coat (reminding me of Dick Tracey) hanging out of a train to grab a cappuccino from a cappuccino machine, and the third of a finely painted coffee cup with a barista floating out of the steam rising from the cup.  and then there are pictures and paintings for sale hung all throughout the the shop.  my favorite part, however, is the ceiling.  it consists of finely detailed tin ceiling tiles, painted a creme color, the duct work is exposed, track lighting at 45 degree angles to the walls, and then, above the coffee bar is an A-frame skylight.  So, in a word the coffee shop has character.  and the coffee wasn't bad either.

anyway, the internship is going well.   I'm learning lots.  there is quite a steep learning curve - I'm doing virtually all cognitive therapy (stuff I haven't done).  my patients are, for the most part, good to work with.  We did an evaluation of one guy yesterday - he was motivated and congenial.  Today, that was not the same story.  He was agitated and uncooperative.  and refused services.  we returned later in the day, no change.  we found out that he was upset about the status of his pills (crushed in applesauce) and was attributing that change to us.  but we never saw him for swallowing eval, so we didn't order that.  Anyway - that's the life of an SLP when you work with brain injury - ups and downs, and - WOW, where did that come from.

Anyway, the coffee shop is about to close (that's a downer - they close early, then again it's in BC, and they probably don't have the customer base to stay open past 6).  Anyway, I will write later.

She had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year.

I have heard that sentence approximately 500 times in the last day .... yay for data analysis.

This picture describes how I feel: coffee is my life blood

Stop the Winter I want to get Warm

So, this post is three drafts and coming - hopefully the fourth time is the charm - but I only have 12 minutes, so I"m not holding out hope

Ok - highlights:

 - feeling very much like an advocate - I have recommendations for online videos about stuttering and a movie about stuttering that were all great - if you want to watch them just let me know.

 - began analyzing data for my thesis (finally).  But it's not perfect - there are still some glitches in the computer code my advisor wrote.

- I'm beginning my internship next Monday (2/18) very excited about that.  Should call my supervisor tomorrow and let her know my plans

 - Class is going well - I really like the online forum thingy - sometimes it's a little annoying (making a certain amount of posts regardless of how much information you stuffed into the first one/two)

 - it's uber windy, snowy and cold here - so much so that they cancelled church this morning.  Which (I must admit) was a pleasant surprise, seeing as though I was supposed to be there at 8 to get ready with the band - I got an extra 3 hours (that's right THREE) of sleep instead.

I just realized that my next statement is a rather philosophical one, and is, thus, deserving of more than the remaining 6 minutes I have until I need to go. - So I shall save my mental musings for another day.

A Free Day

So, it's 12:36, and it is going to be a GREAT day! I thought I had to do hearing screenings from 8-5, I got here at 8 only to find that I didn't have to be here until 9 ... and then I was done at 12. Now, I just got the okay on my thesis chapters from Dr. Tasko (my advisor) so all I had to do was fix my figures (which I just finised) and then I'm done with my thesis until my commitee meeting!

I have nothing more to do today (besides homework for my online class)!! I have a free day - I'm going out for lunch!

Just thought I'd share that with you.

Famous People

So, I met my first 'celebrity' of sorts yesterday.

Bronson Hospital has posted some rather large billboards around Kalamazoo. On those billboards it the profile of the top 3/4 of a man's head. There is text beside his head that reads "The brains behind the brain" or something to that effect. Anyway, so they're boasting about their top-notch neurologists on staff.

Well, last night I was hanging out with Meghan (one of my speech-path friends), her old supervisor (Wendy) and a couple of Wendy's colleagues and friends. Among them: Jeff, the neurologist on the billboards. At first I didn't recognize him (seeing that until that point I'd never seen his whole head, or even his face), but after someone mentioned him being the "brains behind the brain" it clicked.

So, nothing big - just keeping you updated in the aspects of my, ultimately, boring life.

In other news, I have spent the whole weekend working on my thesis (I'm actually typing this at school, Sunday night at 11:51pm, after just sending my advisor my last round of edits). In addition to headings and titles and other such nonsense, I now have figures. Four of them to be exact. They are all visual representations of respiratory, phonatory and/or articulatory movements during speech. But they're done!

I had a bit of a conundrum in getting them to look right. I was using a software called MatLab - it's like a giant calculator and graph generator and a whole bunch of other stuff I forget right now. Anyway, I was building the figures in MatLab, and it does not support subscripts (apparently neither does blogger, I tried to give you an example, but to no avail). Anyway, subscripts are like footnote numbers except at the bottom of the word.

So, using my problem solving skills, I realized that I could paste the figure itself (without text) into powerpoint and then add the text (subscripts and all) in powerpoint. It worked like a charm. Well, almost. In order to get the figures into the word doc. I had to save them as pictures. I saved them as an enhanced media file (.emf).

I had done all of this work on the speech lab's computer, because MatLab isn't mac compatible (I don't think anyway). So, I emailed the thesis to myself, got home opened it up and the figures didn't load. (Needless to say, I was frustrated). So, I came back to the lab to redo the figures (and save them as something else - this time .jpg). I did that, and fixed some other stuff on them (the tops of some of the numbers got cut off, and that suddenly really bothered me, so I fixed them). And now I'm here.

Now that it is 12:04 (and officially Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day) I'm going to brave the bitter cold and go home and go to sleep. Only to wake up, do some work for my online class and I'm going to work on my thesis (ooh, something new and different for me ... hopefully you can sense the sarcasm dripping off of that last phrase).

Ballets and other such nonsense

So, I went to my first live ballet performance.  I went with three of my speech-path friends to see the St. Petersburg Ballet Company perform Swan Lake.  It was nice and all, and I would go see it again, but I think they put too much emphasis on the court scenes.  In case you aren't familiar with Swan Lake, there are 3 acts and 4 scenes.  Act 1, Scene 1 presents the audience with a lively array of dancing: the prince is coming of age and it is time for him to find a wife, but he doesn't like any of the women.  So there's a lot of fal-da-ral and fiddle-y-dee (did you like my reference to Roger and Hammerstien's Cinderella?), and ho-hum dancing.  Then, in Act 1 Scene 2, the prince goes out hunt with the arbalest his mother conveniently gave him in Scene 1.  Now, Act 1, scene 2 - this is where most of the stereotypic ballet representations of Swan Lake come from - you know the "Little Swans" where there are three women with arms linked in connected circles, dancing on their tip-toes.  Well, scene 1 was considerably longer than scene 2 (but scene 2 was considerably better than scene 1).  

Then Act 2, Scene 3 (I don't know why they even label the scene - there is only one scene in the act).  We're back at the court - more dancing stuff.  Meanwhile, I'm thinking - bring back the swans, at least they had good choice in costumes (the courts costumes were rancid).

Act 3, Scene 4.  Back to the swans.  I was excited - I like the swan scenes more than the court scenes.  Well, my elation was to be short lived.  The scene was entirely too short, and the final fight scene between the prince and the evil magician, Robart, bland and short.  I realize that it's ballet, and they can't do massive amounts of stage combat, but I had hoped that the fight scene would be more than the prince leaping past Robart.  But, what made the fight scene even worse was Robart's grandiose, long drawn out death scene.  He took twice as long to die as it took the prince (Sigfreid - I just remembered his name) to kill him.  

Apparently, some of my forays into high culture have left something to be desired.

In other news, I will be submitting the introduction, literature review and methods sections of my thesis to me comity next week.  (hugh sigh of relief).  It's not finished, but I have been working incessantly on it, and I'm glad to have some measure of accomplishment.  If anyone wants and incredibly boring read I can send it to you.  It's all about chest wall adjustments prior to speech initiation, and tongue blade speed movements, and spectrograms and acoustic signals.  At another time I might enjoy reading it, but right now I'm sick of it.  Deciding what measures to take was an incredibly arduous process.  We're looking at the coordination of speech, and so to get a closer look at the coordination of speech we have to take measures from the articulatory system and the respiratory system, and would it be better to measure from the onset of tongue blade movement into constriction until the onset of /sh/ or would it better to measure to the first sign of air release.  Just stuff like that.  I've got some minor edits to do tonight, and then we're having another meeting, and then I get to take a break for a bit - I might celebrate by reading fiction!  Or, maybe I'll watch a movie.

Anyway, not much else is new here.  100 days left until graduation.  I've begun a countdown on my facebook page.  Oh, graduation, how I can't wait until you are here.  I might begin a countdown on my computer too - one can never have too many countdowns when graduation is involved.  I remember that back in high school my friends and I started a countdown the very first day of school.  My friend, Frank, had a magnetic dry erase board in his locker, and so we would draw a new picture featuring the new number of school days left.  It was great fun.  The drawings become more ornate as the remaining number of days grew smaller.

I begin my internship, at Southwest Michigan Rehabilitation Center, in February, so I'll let you know how that goes.