Well, now that the new semester has started I’ll write about clinic last semester.
I had two clients last semester. Both were nonverbal. The irony of it struck me at the end of the semester… I was doing speech therapy on two people that couldn’t speak!
My first client was an almost four year old girl with autism. She has been coming to the clinic for several years. She seems to have the intellectual functioning of about a 1-2 year old. She is a pretty girl and sweet until she doesn’t get her way. When she doesn’t get what she wants she throws a tantrum and screams and cries. Thankfully she is not violent. She constently hummed and experimented with her voice using vowels. I found out at the end of the semester that’s typical with autism. Because her communication was so limited she would take my arm and direct it toward an object she wanted but couldn’t get to. She loved bubbles and would smile and laugh and pop them for hours if allowed. I worked with her alone one hour a week. During that time we worked on getting her to look to request. I would deny the object or action until she looked at me. This often resulted in her crying. One hour a week she was in a group session with another autistic girl the same age. Another client was a 29 year old non-verbal boy with Rubenstein Taybi syndrome at about a 5 year old cognitive level. We had some fun experiences in group therapy!
My second client was a 66 year old woman. She had a stroke in 2001 and a stroke on the other side of her brain in 2005. She has aphasia (cognitive impairment), apraxia (no volitional control in motor planning and sequencing), and dysarthria (muscle weakness). Due to the apraxia and dysarthria she couldn’t speak. She had a laptop with some programs on it to help her communicate, but she wasn’t very good with it. Her husband really wanted her to be able to speak. During the semester we worked on oral motor muscle exercises to increase muscle strength, vowel sounds and typing on her laptop. She greatly improved on her communication speed with her laptop. She worked very hard and was a good client to have. Oh by the way, she was trilingual and taught Spanish and French before her stroke (Spanish is her first language).
So, although I had some tough clients, I learned a great deal from having them. This semester I have two boys, and I will be working with them on articulation and stuttering. That is about all I know since I just got the assignment today. Hopefully I won’t wait until the summer to post about them!