Friday, October 21, 2022

Friday, October 21, 2022

 

I didn’t sleep that well last night. I slept but woke up around five a.m. I wasn’t as deeply rested as I usually am. I stayed in bed doing my exercises and got up around seven. My leg was doing well. Elsa led the way around the block via Punawele. Since we would pass Jackie’s house, I called her. She asked me to call her when I walked so she could join me. Since I didn’t walk her way regularly, this would require planning. I told her I thought the logistics were complicated if we were to do this regularly. I expected she would help me figure out how to do it. No, she accepted it was difficult and said, “Oh, well.” As I entered the street today, I called. I knew she was up by four thirty in the morning. She would be up now. She was on her way out to a doctor’s appointment. “Please, call again.”

  My walk felt completely different. This is the impact of the work Lisa, my chiropractor, did on me on Wednesday. I felt a big difference in my left ankle.

 Second grade L’s mom canceled because the girl was sick. That was my only scheduled appointment for the day except for my fifteen-minute appointment with Adolescent D.

     I have seen improvement in him since yesterday. He responded better, blending two phoneme word pairs. When we started, he couldn’t blend /t/ and /oo/ to get the word to. Today, he blended a few three-phoneme words and then lost it. He blended /n/ and /o/ to get no but was thrown by /n/, /o/ and /t/ to get not. I went back to only giving him two phonemes at a time.  

   I checked with D’s mom to see if his hearing was tested when the school diagnostician tested him. His ability to hear nonspeech sounds was fine. His problem is neurological; it was in his perceptual system.

  I can hear he has problems distinguishing one phonemic sound from another. I got this image of blurry vision and thought, “That’s what it must be like for him. The sounds are fuzzy. He can only understand a word if he hears it in a sentence. If he hears enough of the words accurately, he can figure out the word, but he never hears it clearly. My vision is fading now. If I see a word alone without context, it is sometimes hard for me to figure out what it is. When I see it in context, and I see what makes sense in that sentence, the letters ‘look’ clearer. That’s because I know what I’m looking for. It’s top-down rather than bottom-up, which is reliant on perception.

  I understood poor auditory perception in a new way today. Since I struggle with my vision now, I often figure out words through blurred vision using top-down thinking, using context to infer what the word must be. Just as blurred vision makes reading a challenge, “blurred” sounds make listening a challenge. Just as blurred vision means not seeing the basic units of objects or letters clearly, blurred sound means we don’t hear individual phonemes clearly. When phonemes are blended into words, their sounds are altered. It’s the effect of connected speech. Hearing and processing a sequence of phonemes is necessary to understand what others say. Relying heavily on top-down processing, either visual or auditory, is exhausting.