Not much to report on day three. Things are settling into a pattern. I’m getting used to them being in winter, with people being sick and dressed in puffy vests or jackets, while I’m slowly burning up in Toronto heat. I’ve met all the people I will work with, I believe. I hope so. Learning new faces and new accents every day, three days in a row, is not easy with a brain injury! Each brings their own angle to the work; I learn something different from each one, although the work is the same. We begin with one or two sentence-by-sentence then finish up with a two-sentence multiple sentence reading of a one-paragraph story. I think I’m fine as we begin. Within seconds, my brain goes, nah, don’t wanna work. The first sentence of the hour or of a harder task kind of fizzles away in my memory. Sometimes I can snag on to all the details in some sort of grasping of vague-feeling words. Other times, I’m prompted or the sentence is reread to me. After that, I can see the words, not images, of the following sentence(s) being read to me or that I read; then I must conjure up pictures representing the sentence or two sentences. But every now and then, image fragments appear as the words are being read to me.
I’m starting to get the hang of the fact that the pictures don’t have to make logical sense, just that they represent in a way that will help me remember the sentence(s). We finish when the clock runs out, wherever we happen to be in the last reading. Today, we stopped after I did a picture summary of a multiple-sentence recall. Thank GOD! I went and bit into an ice cream sandwich. Savoured its coldness and rush of glucose to my starving neurons.
