Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Finding My Voice with Aphasia: Walking Through Aphasia
    Finding My Voice with Aphasia: Walking Through Aphasia
    Finding My Voice with Aphasia: Walking Through Aphasia
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Finding My Voice with Aphasia: Walking Through Aphasia

    By Carol M. Maloney

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    On June 9, 2009, Carol M. Maloney, a veteran teacher, experienced a transient ischemic attack in the left hemisphere of her brain. She helplessly observed her mind deteriorate to the point where she could not speak, walk, read, identify household objects, or recall her family. Maloney traveled between the worlds of the surreal and the logical. The stroke resulted in aphasia, the loss of communication and other functions of her left hemisphere.

    After eighteen months of rehabilitation, she was finally able to communicate with others by using her hand as a metronome. The frustration of having the words and sentences formed in her mind but being unable to share them caused frustration and depression. Her verbal abilities suffered, along with her reading and comprehension skills. Even so, hard work, strong will, and persistence has allowed her to reach out to other teachers to offer new insight into the minds of her beloved special-education and reading-disabled students.

    In this, her story, Maloney turns her experience into a unique opportunity to gain an understanding of her students difficulties and to share that knowledge with other teachers.

    Ms. Carol Maloney has written a compelling story that chronicles her amazing life before, during, and after her devastating stroke. She writes with frankness that touches ones heart. Her story will lend encouragement to those who have suffered a stroke as well as offer strategies to those who have a loved one recovering from one. Carol Maloney developed aphasia after her stroke. I am happy to say that she has survived and conquered both the devastation of her stroke and her aphasia. I know this first hand: she conducts amazing PowerPoint presentations to my graduate class at Rivier University each semester. She is an inspiration to all who want to improve themselves. In this book, Carol clearly describes the strategies that she used to help her become the functioning writer and speaker that she is today.

    J. Diane Connell, Ed.D.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateMay 10, 2013
    ISBN9781475986709
    Finding My Voice with Aphasia: Walking Through Aphasia
    Author

    Carol M. Maloney

    Carol M. Maloney is a Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History alumni and attended Columbia University in New York, in 2003. She has a Master’s degree in education and a Certificate in Advanced Graduate Studies in adolescent literacy and learning. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

    Related to Finding My Voice with Aphasia

    Related ebooks

    Self-Improvement For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Old And The Beautiful

      Mar 24, 2020

      The Old And The Beautiful
      4 min read

    • Article

      Training May Restore Some Vision After a Stroke

      Apr 13, 2017

      A new study provides the first evidence that rigorous visual training recovers basic vision in cortically blind patients with long-standing stroke damage in the primary visual cortex. Damage to this area of the brain prevents visual information from

      3 min read

    • Article

      Worry, Be Gone!

      Dec 29, 2022

      Worry, Be Gone!
      2 min read

    • Article

      ADELE S transformation

      Nov 16, 2021

      ADELE S transformation
      2 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Mar 1, 2021

      The quality of your personal relationships has never mattered more. It isn’t enough to have lots of friends on social media, or to give ‘everything’ to work hoping that will validate your existence. When familiar certainties are dissolving, we need t

      3 min read

    • Article

      Read yourself HEALTHY

      Jul 10, 2019

      Read yourself HEALTHY
      3 min read

    • Article

      Learning To break Free

      Aug 13, 2020

      Learning To break Free
      6 min read

    • Article

      Brain Food

      Oct 28, 2020

      Brain Food
      3 min read

    • Article

      Ignorance: The Dharma And The Fruit Fly

      Mar 23, 2021

      A couple of days ago, I was talking to a fruit fly that was hovering around the kitchen while I was preparing to heat up dinner. “It’s a good thing that I believe in the sanctity of life,” I said to the fly, opening the microwave door. Then I laughed

      1 min read

    • Article

      Go On Retreat At Home

      May 19, 2020

      Go On Retreat At Home
      5 min read

    • Article

      Love

      Apr 2, 2020

      In any long-term relationship there are days when smothering your beloved in their sleep may cross your mind. This, however, is quite extreme and not (usually) recommended. But what the heck happened? How did you get from angels singing every time th

      3 min read

    • Article

      What I Wish you Knew About Grief

      Apr 4, 2021

      Grief can also be a time of joy. Dad had Alzheimer’s and was deteriorating. In his last year he was 80 years old, but felt more like a teenager. He had an overwhelming love affair with my mum – he would call her “my queen” and serenade her and stare

      4 min read

    • Article

      Breaking Up With Alcohol

      Jan 5, 2022

      Breaking Up With Alcohol
      3 min read

    • Article

      Turn To The Angels

      Dec 22, 2020

      I was asked recently if angels could help to keep a long-term relationship from going stale and my answer was a definite ‘Yes!’ There are oodles of angels just lining up ready and waiting to support you in any way they can. There’s Raphael, Haniel, A

      4 min read

    • Article

      Neglected Kids Do Better With Earlier Foster Family Placement

      Feb 2, 2018

      Neglected children placed with foster care families earlier in life are more likely to be as resilient and competent socially, academically, and physically as their peers who have never been institutionalized when they reach their teenage years, acco

      2 min read

    • Article

      LIFE AFTER loss

      Sep 22, 2019

      LIFE AFTER loss
      3 min read

    • Article

      2-minute Questionnaire May Detect Autism

      Feb 5, 2018

      A new two-minute questionnaire for parents could help pediatricians detect autism in toddlers earlier, at a time when intervention might be crucial, a new study indicates. Lead investigator Walter Zahorodny, associate professor of pediatrics at Rutge

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Finding My Voice with Aphasia

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Finding My Voice with Aphasia - Carol M. Maloney

      Copyright © 2013 by Carol M. Maloney.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-8669-3 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-8720-1 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-8670-9 (ebk)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2013907067

      iUniverse rev. date: 05/07/2013

      Contents

      PART ONE       LIFE BEFORE MY STROKE

      PART TWO       THE STROKE

      PART THREE       LIFE AFTER MY STROKE

      LIFESAVING SIGNS OF A STROKE

      RESOURCES

      To my late mother and my Dad.

      Thank you for being there for me and helping me through my stroke and for your continuing encouragement with my aphasia.

      My first kiss and the flowerbed.

      Your first puppy love is wonderful and never forgotten.

      Thanks, Billy

      PART ONE

      LIFE BEFORE MY STROKE

      Girls, wake up! It is seven o’clock. Half the day is gone. We need to clean this house. T’was the Irish battle cry every Saturday morning. It did not matter that we cleaned the house every night before we went to bed. Saturday was a special cleaning day. On that day we polished furniture, washed windows, and cleaned the beloved crystal chandelier and the kitchen until every countertop, every leg of every table, and every chair was polished. The floors were washed and the rugs vacuumed. The two bathrooms, used by the seven of us, were scoured until they shined like the sun reflecting from the crystal chandelier. Dismissal time was three o’clock—only then could we go out with our friends. My mother was first-generation Irish and continued this tradition she had learned from her mother.

      The tradition continued as I grew older and even after I left home in 1980. I always cleaned my home on Saturday morning. And I kept cleaning when I moved back home with my parents in 1998 to help my mother take care of Dad after cardiac surgery and never left. Mom passed away in 2007, and I continued the Saturday morning tradition. One Saturday morning in June 2009, I heard the battle cry to clean the house, but little did I know this battle cry would become a cry for help—I had a stroke while cleaning the house.

      EDUCATION

      I graduated from a Catholic high school believing the only job I was capable of doing was waitressing. In my junior year my guidance counselor reported to my mother and I that she believed I was not capable of college-level work because I was extremely shy, had B-minus to C grades, and did poorly on my pre-SAT. The counselor believed college-level work would be too difficult for me, and therefore it would be a waste of time and money. Feelings of disappointment, discouragement, and failure overwhelmed me. My goal to be the first child in the family to graduate from college vanished with those words. My mother was furious at the counselor. She could not believe the counselor would express her beliefs in such a callous manner. My mother’s response was, We will see about that! as she stormed out the counselor’s office with me on her arm. We did not speak about it that night. The next day was Saturday and we cleaned the house, only this time in deep thought about those devastating words.

      My senior year in high school I met Sister Rose Paula, who taught US history. She was kind but very strict. As the first few months of school went by, she realized my reading level was below average and my comprehension and ability to recall the material were poor, resulting in an inability to do well on the written test. Soon I was in her classroom taking a Stanford reading evaluation test. A few days later she told me that my reading and comprehension abilities were below average by several grade levels and that this was what had caused my frustration and poor grades overall. We, my friend, she said, are going to teach you to read. The next several months Sister Rose Paula and I stayed after school for my reading program. Start with the basics and move to mastery was our motto. Weeks later our hard work resulted in improved grades and better reading and comprehension skills. At the end of my senior year, my reading and comprehension were at grade level. Our hard work had paid off. Reading is a lifelong skill needed to succeed, and Sister Rose Paula gave me a new life. I graduated from high school prepared for my next challenge. Later in life I emulated Sister Rose Paula in my teaching.

      My academic journey continued in September 1971 at Quincy Junior College in Quincy, Massachusetts. My goal was to prove to myself that I could be more than a waitress. No student should ever hear those stinging words, and therefore I set my sights on teaching. Quincy Junior College offered new life experiences for me. My sisters and I had been lovingly sheltered from the world. We had attended all-girl parochial schools and had experienced very little interaction with the outside world, including boys.

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1