Living with Epilepsy and Aphasia – June 14
This has been a good week and a bad week. Oops, I think someone has already started a story something like that (What was it? “These are the best of times and the worst of times.”)
I won’t say the best of times, but it started out as a good week. I have been getting around so well recently without many balance problems that my wife decided that she could trust me at home alone for an hour while she went out to run an errand. (Oops, home alone; again didn’t someone else use that phrase first? Are all the good phrases already used? Isn’t there anything new under the sun? But didn’t Solomon already ask that question?). My maiden solo voyage started out wonderfully. I stayed upstairs at my computer and didn’t try to go downstairs.
Then came the bad part. (“Not the worst of times, not the season of darkness, not the winter of despair” but more like a thunder storm at the end of a sunny day.) When I am sitting at my computer, I have a tendency to revert to my pre-incident days of fiddling with the computer and changing settings. This time I was having trouble reading the small print in emails and web articles, so I thought I will just enlarge the images on the screen. Well, I found the instructions on how to do that and after several attempts of trying to follow those instructions, WHOA, I got larger images. Be careful what you ask for! (Did someone beat me to that one, too?) The images were now so large that pages such as my email list or calendar spilled off the page. Even my desktop was too big for one screen. I thought, if I did this, I can undo it. Wrong. Trying to follow the instructions to change the size of images didn’t work this time. And somewhere in the fray, some short cuts to programs disappeared from my desktop. I even tried using the program listing format of desktop, and as far as I can tell the programs are gone from my computer. They were nowhere to be found. I was able to find Outlook, Internet Explorer, Word, Excel and Debrief, so I thought I can at least continue working on my email correspondence, diary, educational essays, blog and twitter accounts. Not so fast. Because the screen images are now supersized, the save button is no longer visible at the bottom of the screen. That meant that I had to work around and through the two “Save” options available within the task bar at the top of the screen, since I like to save new drafts with a different name than the original. I can’t use a straight forward “Save.” I need to use “Save as.” The help function was of no help because the help button got supersized off the right-hand edge of the screen. I usually keep several copies of essays so that I can go back to previous editions or drafts to see the progression of thought in the essays or email drafts. I find this very helpful in my journey of learning how to write again.
I have to remember that my ability to follow directions (my wife will tell you that it was never great) is now less than spectacular. I need someone behind me or right along beside me, slapping my hand and saying you shouldn’t do that when I try to do something with a very involved set of directions. I don’t seem to have the willpower to monitor and control myself in that way. This reminds me of what my physical therapist kept trying to pound into my head as we worked through my balance tests and exercises. The whole time standing next to me, she would say, “To improve, you need to stretch the envelope safely.” I told her that a light bulb was burnt out in my office and I was thinking about stretching the envelope by getting out a step stool and changing the bulb. She quickly injected, “No, you are not. You are not ready for ladders yet.”
Next week I will relate my travails with my cell phone and PDA, but that will have to wait. Maybe by next week, I will have the computer and the cell phone figured out or I will have found someone who can help me. From what I have found so far, it appears that the PDA is going to be a whole different can of worms (or is it kettle of fish?).
Each year, congress passes a resolution that designates June as National Aphasia Awareness Month to support efforts to increase the awareness of aphasia. June 2010 is National Aphasia Awareness Month. Check the National Aphasia Association http://www.aphasia.org/ website for information about events in your area.
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