FW: Update on Terry WA5NTI

[William Fenn]

fyi

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Rinehart [mailto:mrinehart at cox.net] 
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2016 1:26 PM
To: W4IY/R <wwi-reflector at googlegroups.com>
Cc: William Fenn <wfenn4 at verizon.net>
Subject: Update on Terry WA5NTI

I visited yesterday afternoon with Terry WA5NTI at the Healthsouth
Rehabilitation Hospital located at 24430 Millstream Drive in Aldie, VA. He
is in Room 138.

George WB5OYP from the AMRAD club was there and Carl WB4ZNH stopped by also.
Terry is alert and recognizes people to say hi. He is paralyzed on the right
side, but has control of his left side. His ability to communicate is
impaired by a combination of aphasia (thinks apples/"a" and comes out
gravy/"m") and apraxia (control of voice muscles confused). 

George and I spent some time working to map the alphabet onto a five-by-five
grid, since Terry can signal 1-2-3-4-5 reliably using his left hand.
Unfortunately, even pointing at the letters, we got a string of consonants
with just a few vowels. We then tried having Terry say each letter of the
alphabet and writing down phonetically what he said for each letter. Same
results in spelling out words. I spent some time updating him and reading
him some news. He smiled and said "all right" when I read him the report
that the FBI had reopened the email investigation, so I know Terry is aware
and cognizant even though he can't say much.

The nurses got him dressed and in a wheelchair and I sat with him while
watching TV in the lounge room until supper. I was working with Terry with a
sound board application on my iPad when his speech rehabilitation counselor
came in. She indicated that the sound board I was using might be too hard
for Terry to read the word labels and suggested finding one with pictures
for word labels. She took him down to dinner as I was leaving and she did
say that Terry was making considerable progress even though it did not seem
so at the moment.

I did find a picture sound board late last night. The two free applications
for the iPad which I found are EESpeech Basic and Grid Player. There are
probably similar apps for Android devices as well. If you are able to visit,
you might want to pre-load such an application to try. Terry clearly wants
to communicate and working with him helps to re-open the brain channels he
needs to use to talk again.

73

Mark Rinehart
KV4UC at arrl.net
mrinehart at cox.net
703-399-1176 cell
Lorton VA