Thursday, March 17, 2005
Huzzah for Frist. ...
Sen. Frist is pulling the whole story together from his unique medical + legal viewpoint. He mentions that rehabilitation can change things, but it hasn't been tried.
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Copying now from my earlier LJ entries, a personal experience with a somewhat similar
case, which seemed hopeless until rehab work caused something to 'click'.
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(written 2/23)
Listening to Terri's relatives on Fox. They mentioned that she hasn't been receiving any speech therapy. Hadn't heard that before. That's pretty nearly criminal, and I can speak from experience.
Back in 1985, I was a research assistant in the speech & hearing department at Univ. of Kansas. One of the therapists asked me to build a communication device for an unresponsive case; she hadn't been able to get any progress and needed to show something concrete. (Ah, the institutional imperatives!)
The case -- call her Ellen -- had received spine and brain damage several years earlier in a car accident. She wasn't as badly off as Terri, but essentially the only thing she could move reliably was the eyes and side-to-side neck muscles.
Her family had worked out an alphabet board system, in which the other person did most of the work, using context.
I rigged up a cheap row-column device, using a Radio Shack Color Computer and a custom-made headset, so that Ellen could put letters on the screen by turning her head at the appropriate time. She didn't like the gadget, and didn't seem to like me, but the therapist nevertheless made her practice with it until she became proficient. (At that time, a commercial device to do the same job would have cost about $10K; mine was about $200!)
Further development would have included a printer, but there was no need for it, because Ellen suddenly started to move toward real speech. Who knows why..... possibly learning how to use the gadget -- or just the experience of communicating without the other person doing most of the work -- stirred up some disconnected circuits in the brain. Or she was just ready.
In any case, it took some intensive work to reach the point of speech.
Would Terri improve like that? We'll never know, because the experiment HASN'T BEEN TRIED, DAMMIT.
------- end earlier entry ¶ 8:38 PM
----------
Copying now from my earlier LJ entries, a personal experience with a somewhat similar
case, which seemed hopeless until rehab work caused something to 'click'.
-----------
(written 2/23)
Listening to Terri's relatives on Fox. They mentioned that she hasn't been receiving any speech therapy. Hadn't heard that before. That's pretty nearly criminal, and I can speak from experience.
Back in 1985, I was a research assistant in the speech & hearing department at Univ. of Kansas. One of the therapists asked me to build a communication device for an unresponsive case; she hadn't been able to get any progress and needed to show something concrete. (Ah, the institutional imperatives!)
The case -- call her Ellen -- had received spine and brain damage several years earlier in a car accident. She wasn't as badly off as Terri, but essentially the only thing she could move reliably was the eyes and side-to-side neck muscles.
Her family had worked out an alphabet board system, in which the other person did most of the work, using context.
I rigged up a cheap row-column device, using a Radio Shack Color Computer and a custom-made headset, so that Ellen could put letters on the screen by turning her head at the appropriate time. She didn't like the gadget, and didn't seem to like me, but the therapist nevertheless made her practice with it until she became proficient. (At that time, a commercial device to do the same job would have cost about $10K; mine was about $200!)
Further development would have included a printer, but there was no need for it, because Ellen suddenly started to move toward real speech. Who knows why..... possibly learning how to use the gadget -- or just the experience of communicating without the other person doing most of the work -- stirred up some disconnected circuits in the brain. Or she was just ready.
In any case, it took some intensive work to reach the point of speech.
Would Terri improve like that? We'll never know, because the experiment HASN'T BEEN TRIED, DAMMIT.
------- end earlier entry ¶ 8:38 PM
