Sheena Waldron - Dysarthria
It’s such an exciting time to be a speech and language therapist in Lincolnshire.
Does working in a rural county present its challenges? Yes. In the dead of winter, when I’m driving along a single-track road looking for a numberless house that my sat-nav assures me is in the middle of a wheat field, do I wish that I could be working in a nice comfortable clinic room? Sometimes.
But when the sun is shining and I’m surrounded by nature, heading home from a patient that has just managed to take part in a full conversation for the first time since their stroke, then there’s nowhere I’d rather be!
Slurred speech is one of the things people most often associate with a stroke, and it does make up a large proportion of my caseload. But this is just one potential way in which dysarthria (motor speech disorder) can present.
Seeing patients in their own home setting has helped me to see beyond just “the impairment” and really see the individual person and their need to use speech meaningfully and functionally.
In fact, one of the first questions I will often ask is “Is there anything you would normally do that you can’t do now, because of your speech?” This question has helped me uncover so many surprising goals: A man whose mild slurring of speech had knocked his confidence to the extent that he no longer felt able to visit his friends at the pub, a lady whose job was reliant on her calming and confident telephone-manner but who now had a quiet, hoarse voice that left her breathless when speaking, and a patient who said he didn’t care if other people couldn’t understand him, as long as he could clearly tell his daughter that he loved her.
Whether it’s working on breathing techniques, strategies for clearer and louder speech, increasing a person’s confidence to just have a conversation with a stranger, or working with family/ friends/ carers to help them understand how to best support communication, we cannot underestimate the difference that the knowledge and guidance we provide as SLTs can make to a person’s life.
Every day I see my patients achieve a meaningful communication goal is a day that I’m proud to be a speech and language therapist!