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Word by Word Silenced by stroke or trauma, clients at UCF’s Aphasia House learn to communicate again with unique, intensive therapy. But the need for care — and more trained therapists — outstrips resources.
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t might not look like it at first glance, but Stuart Neale is a lucky man. One year to the day after retiring as chief financial officer of a large power generation services company, he took his dogs for their morning walk and didn’t come back. After his neighbors found him on the sidewalk, he was rushed to the hospital, where he spent nine days in intensive care recovering from a stroke. Like approximately a third of stroke victims, Stuart discovered as his body grew healthier that his speech wasn’t coming back. The only word he could say was “be.” Be. Be, be? Be, be, be! Whatever he tried to express, that’s all that came out. His luck came in the form of one of his nurses, a UCF graduate who happened to have heard as a student about a therapy center on campus for people with aphasia, a disorder resulting from damage to parts of the brain that control language and speech. Commonly caused by stroke, that damage can also be the result of head trauma or tumors.
A Tough Year When Stuart was finally discharged, his wife, Charlane, was told, in effect, to park him in an assisted living facility and move on. Instead, she took him home and got to work. She knew her husband was in there; she just had to find help to pull him out. So she looked up the facility Stuart’s nurse had mentioned, the Aphasia House, which is part of UCF’s Communication Disorders Clinic in the
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College of Health and Public Affairs. There, director Janet Whiteside, a leading expert on aphasia and other communication disorders, evaluated Stuart and confirmed what Charlane already knew: his intellect was intact; he just couldn’t talk. By anybody’s measure, the year since that first visit has been tough. Stuart has struggled to regain his speech, word by word, in challenging, intensive therapy sessions with UCF graduate students who Charlane says are “full of compassion, personally invested, and up to the minute on speech therapy.” A tireless supporter and cheerleader, Charlane has worked just as hard.
A Wonderful Gift But the results are more than worth the struggle. “A lot of who Stuart Neale is has come back,” Charlane says. “The Aphasia House gave us our lives back.” Trim and tan with a wide, quick smile, Stuart now expresses himself well in a combination of writing and halting but clearly enunciated speech. He drives. He reads. Though retired, he still analyzes financial markets. He shoots pool with acquaintances who don’t even know he’s had a stroke. The struggle isn’t over for Stuart, but he’s determined to win it. And, compared to the alternative that so many similar patients face — deteriorating wordlessly in front of televisions while the world passes outside — that struggle is a wonderful gift. An Urgent Need It’s a gift that Charlane wishes more people could
$32,448
Total cash donations received to help 25 UCF students displaced by an apartment complex fire this summer
When an accidental fire destroyed much of the Tivoli Apartments near UCF’s main campus July 12, leaving many of the UCF students who lived there temporarily homeless, the university community came together in a truly inspiring way to help them get back on their feet. Alumni, students, faculty, staff and friends flooded the Knights Helping Knights Pantry with food, clothing and other essentials (plus 14 laptops given by alumnus Ken Brown, ’02), while cash donations poured in via the UCF Foundation website.
receive. But the Aphasia House operates on a tight budget — already supported in significant part by an anonymous donor — with limited resources to get the word out to doctors and hospitals. In fact, says Charlane, if Stuart’s UCF-trained nurse hadn’t been aware of the Aphasia House, they might never have known it existed. There’s also a greater need for care than current resources can accommodate. Even with a $7,500 fee for the six-week Intensive Comprehensive Aphasia Program, there’s a waiting list for admission. Why? Because, quite simply, there’s nothing else like it anywhere. Directed by preeminent aphasiologists, the Aphasia House delivers cutting-edge therapy designed for the client to address not only language challenges but also life goals after stroke or trauma. The unique, home-like setting and intensive, four-day-a-week, four-hour-a-day schedule yield markedly better results than typical therapy programs. Even more urgent than the need to treat more patients at the Aphasia House is the need to train more therapists in the techniques used there. Today’s dedicated graduate students are tomorrow’s therapists and professors. And Whiteside, the director, sees great hope in sending ever-increasing numbers of them into the nation’s communities to replicate the program she has built at UCF. Increased philanthropic support, she says, “would expand our influence in educating the next generation of speech-language pathologists in innovative therapy and delivery options.” Which means luck won’t be quite so important for people like Stuart Neale.
Open House Oct. 9 Learn more about the program and tour the Aphasia House at a Communication Disorders Clinic open house Oct. 9 from 1 to 3 p.m., 3280 Progress Dr., Suite 300 and 500, in Research Park near UCF’s main campus. Please register for this complimentary event at ucfknightsnetwork.com/ clinicopenhouse. To learn more about giving opportunities, visit www.ucffoundation.org/aphasiahouse or contact Julie Benson at 407.882.0225 or julie.benson@ucf.edu.