Most proud of?

This week's prompt for the Toastmaster's group at the BU Aphasia Center is "What I'm most proud of". This is what I wrote.

Shortly after I got home from the hospital after my stroke, I received a survey from the Hospital asking for feedback of my experience there.

It was so early in my recovery but I just knew I had to share my story with people at the hospital so they could possibly do better to help people in the future. I didn’t know how I would accomplish it, but this became one of my long term goals and I was committed to doing everything I could to make it a reality.

For the entire time I was at the hospital, I couldn’t speak at all or even utter any sounds, I couldn’t tell them what I needed or participate in any of my care decisions. Even though some staff was wonderful and made me feel comfortable. I was not given any means to communicate my needs other than them asking yes/no questions and these were few and far between. Most staff didn’t even speak directly to me. They would talk to my family when they were there, and when I was alone, they did their work silently or talked to other staff. I wanted so badly to communicate with them and my family especially when things seemed to be going wrong and I could have given information that could have helped. As an example, I was still in a lot of pain from a recent surgery and was prescribed pain medication. When my husband came to pick me up at discharge, he asked the nurse when I was last given pain medication so he could give me the next dose at home. He was told, “She hasn’t had any pain medication today. She didn’t ask for it? Now I know, if I were just given a communication board or even a marker and paper, my stay could have been better and staff could have provided better care.

As you can tell now the standard survey forms with bubbles to fill in would’t have been enough to convey all that I wanted the hospital to know.

It’s taken me this long, almost 2 years, to be able to get out the language needed to tell my story and just last month, I completed my story in writing. It had to be revised and edited several times to make sure that I got my point across in as few words as necessary. It is Over 2200 words. Of course, I had to have a lot of help from my family and especially my speech therapist but this is what I’m most proud of.

Now I’m ready to share my story with the hospital. As luck would have it, my therapist is a board member of an aphasia support group in RI and their mission is to educate people about aphasia. they would like to connect with the hospital to offer an inservice training to staff. They are going to connect with me with the administration and we hope to have a meeting soon.