When you’re struggling to speak after a stroke, you may worry that you’ll never be able to communicate effectively again. But by including speech and language therapy as part of your stroke recovery, you’ll set communication goals and even find new ways to get your point across.

Tools to overcome your speech challenges may include:

  • Working with a trained speech and language therapist
  • Using notebooks or pictures to communicate while you relearn speech
  • Using computer programs to practice building sentences
  • Practicing desired “real world” skills, such as socializing, ordering off menus, or sending emails
  • Taking part in ongoing community-based stroke recovery

Customizing Your Post-Stroke Speech Rehab Plan

Your personal goals, strengths, and weaknesses will shape your speech rehabilitation, says Janet Brown, MA, director of health care services in speech-language pathology at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in Rockville, Md.

“Therapy for someone who has had a stroke is a collaboration with a skilled speech language therapist and the patient and family,” says Brown. For example, two people may test with the same speech-language deficit, but if one is a dedicated reader and the other primarily wants to regain her ability to chat with her friends, their speech rehabilitation programs will be different.

Brown emphasizes that speech recovery may take time — years, in some cases — and interventions are progressive, beginning with compensation strategies to make people understood.

“Let’s say they have a lot of difficulty expressing themselves. You may want to compensate by giving them written information, like a notebook that has a lot of commonly written phrases or pictures,” says Brown. This approach can help ease some of the emotional stress, depression, and sense of isolation that accompanies speech problems.

Besides using strategies such as notebooks to communicate while going through speech rehabilitation, some stroke survivors may need “processing prostheses” — computer programs that allow them to visually interact with language so that they can get practice forming complicated sentences. After a brief period of training, stroke survivors can use these programs at home to improve their speech.

Lifelong Stroke Therapy

Brown points out that the understanding of stroke recovery is changing, and with it the approach to speech rehabilitation.

“The thinking now is that recovery from stroke is lifelong, as long as an individual is continuing to work on communication skills,” she says. While medical facilities may not be able to provide lifelong speech rehabilitation programs, many communities have organizations for stroke survivors that help them practice speech in real-world settings, such as eating out or using e-mail. Regaining these everyday functions also goes a long way towards helping stroke survivors feel more normal, says Brown.

Recovering Speech: One Stroke Survivor’s Story

In early October 2003, Tom Harper of Slidell, La., woke up feeling fine, went through his morning routine, and found that when his wife of 52 years greeted him, he couldn’t utter a word. At the hospital Harper was told he had experienced “the perfect example of a TIA,” a transient ischemic attack or mini-stroke that indicates a high future stroke risk.

His stroke recovery plan included visiting a speech therapist for three months.

“They would start out with polysyllables like behavior, valentines, division — things like that, three syllables, then four and five syllables, macaroni, favorable, temperature,” Harper recalls. He also remembers being challenged to read aloud paragraphs of increasing complexity and also to perform other language-skills tasks, like finding individual letters in a text to practice letter recognition.

“We kept working like that until I would be able to read a paragraph and the words got more difficult, but it was amazing. Some of the smaller words were more trouble than the four or five syllables sometimes,” recalls Harper.

Six years later, his speech is nearly perfect and Harper, 73, is back to leading an active life as an avid ping pong player, square dancer, and amateur chess competitor.

With time and effort, you too can soon be back on top of your game.