(Soft piano music) (Typing sounds) My name is Simon Barton.

I was born in southwest London.

In 1960, and I moved here with my family in 1994, so I'm...

Right now you're speaking to me Wake Forest, which is where I'm currently living.

And we have three children, all born within a year of each other.

All December children as well.

That's only because my wife will allow me sex once a year.

Well, he made me laugh.

He's very funny.

He was always joking.

Very naughty in school.

My life was...um... active.

I was active both socially and commercially with my business.

I'm an engineer by trade.

I'm an early riser, so I was typically up before the phones would ring at 5 or 6:00 every morning at my office and work until the day was done, 6 or 7:00 in the evening, and then come back, collapsed in front of the TV and do it all again the next day.

And the next day.

Every day was action packed.

On May the 22nd, 2012, about 36 weeks ago.

I went to work.

It was an ordinary weekday.

It was a Wednesday.

I got a phone call because his business, my daughter worked there, my son worked there and my son in law worked there.

So I three family members in the office.

So I got a phone call from my daughter to say, mum, there's something wrong with dad.

I said, what do you mean there's something wrong with him?

She said it.

She said, it's bad and went the way she said it.

She said, I think you better come.

The lady on the phone was asking a barrage-a bunch of questions, and I could feel myself getting a little bit dizzy and maybe not speaking as fluently as I like to think I can.

She kept asking for my date of birth as a security question, and I remember repeating it over and over again and every time I said it, it seemed to get hard to say.

See, one of the big things I remember the most.

And then all of a sudden I came across really, really tired to the point that I just suddenly fell asleep I thought, Put the phone on the desk and fell off my chair.

They obviously assessed I had a blood clot issue that cut off some of the blood to my brain.

And they put him into like a sort of a coma, I think, because I am complete, I have no idea.

I don't-I know what a stroke is, but not from personal experience other than people that were older had them.

Often.

I didn't know that.

You know, that people are so young and relatively healthy and fit.

Could get some could have something like this.

And I said, oh, and then of course, my whole world changed at that point, Because the second thing that was fortunately in my case is that my stroke was a what they call a right sided stroke, which meant that I could speak.

Reasonably well and will continue to speak reasonably well.

I hope.

Right hemisphere Brain Damage, or RHD, is a diagnostic label of a constellation of impairment that occur after stroke to the right side of the brain.

While damage to either hemisphere results in physical and cognitive challenges, the communication challenges are an important distinction.

We chose to target communication in a therapeutic way with students at North Carolina Central University.

The Right Communication Group is a fairly new therapeutic group that myself and Ms. LaToria Jallah, who is a clinical speech language pathologist, started last year.

The purpose of that group is to enhance awareness of communication changes, but also to provide some therapeutic solutions for improving communication on a daily basis.

Ummm, coming from a country that is notoriously wet and gloomy and drizzly and miserable all the time, when I came here in 94, I had a fantastic first couple of years.

It was fabulous.

And I thought,..thought how lucky I was to be here, but now I want my money back because it's it's like bloody London.

It's awful.

The students that I encounter usually have no experience about RHD when they enter my clinic.

I'll be honest, I didn't know what to expect.

I kind of had this assumption that, like, stroke looked like, you know, right side weakness.

Aphasia and the language aspects is what I was typically associating strokes with.

And so it was really an interesting process to kind of like get exposed to some of the different characteristics of someone with right hemisphere damage.

I get, I lose patience, with people who drag, a story out, can we just do the chase?

And that's it.

Were you able to share those with your wife?

Yeah., and, ummmm.

Yeah.

What did she think about them?

What does she think about them?

Yeah, did she think they were great goals that you could work on?

She's been working on it for a lot, for 36 years.

Even though they may present with no deficits, doing activities with them or just really getting to know them and knowing them and how they present, it's easier to pick up on those kind of nuances of a right hemisphere disorder.

Oh yes, post-stroke a completely different person.

For me anyway...

It's because somebody might tell a story or something.

And halfway through I'm listening and kind of a thought comes into my mind of what they're taught, you know that I might like to ask or ask further clarification and then not thought being in there, I'm now not listening to anything else they're saying.

Whereas before I could at least have thoughts and still listen.

The perception when you initially look at a right hemisphere stroke survivor is that they are just fine.

They speak fluently, they are just fine.

They can put the words together, they can communicate, you know, at a basic level, most of them.

But it's pairing that with the context in which the communication is produced and the language is produced.

So there is often a mismatch between the words that are articulated in the sentences that are constructed in the context in which the communication occurs.

Good girl, good girl.

My name is Linda Fatca and I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up in Miami, Florida.

I'm the oldest of three girls.

Before my stroke, I was a physician.

I was a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology.

So I delivered babies and saw women in the clinic.

I was married, 20 years and had a son who had just turne 14 and was about to go to high school.

My name is Patricia Carrington and I'm from Durham.

I have one daughter, beautiful daughter, Caitlyn Carrington.

She's, she's she, graduated from Appalachian State.

And so it was my daughter and I. I was in the hospital for about 30, 35 days.

I think it was.

And, life changed completely.

When I was first, like, immediately the first couple of after my stroke and I would walk down the hall and literally bump off the wall every couple of steps, people could watch me and see that I was doing that, but somehow I didn't know I had to have help getting up out of bed.

And I had to have help doing everything.

If you say something to me in a kind tone of voice, or you say something to me in a mean tone of voice, they could be the same words.

From the inside...

I didn't have a way of knowing which way you meant those words, and I think it caused a lot of problems, particularly with people who are close to me, my my family, my husband.

Well, the way I saw it in the beginning was all of this was happening to somebody else.

It couldn't be happening to me.

I'm not working now.

I think.

Between the communication issues.

And maybe some personality changes.

Unfortunately, my marriage didn't make it.

And I understand that's really common, especially after right sided strokes.

You want to get with you and you.

You can't understand why you can't get well if you're doing everything that you're supposed to do.

When you are alone at night, all these things seem to kind of haunt you.

If thats a good word.

You know, when you got people there its different, people are around you.

But then when you're all alone, then it's just you and the strok Oh, gosh.

Probably about two months after my stroke.

And, I was in, occupational therapy.

And they gave me one of those connect the dots pictures that you do with four year olds.

And one, two, three, four up to 25.

And you get a picture of a sailboat.

And I couldn't do it.

I was a wife.

I was a mother.

I was a doctor.

And now I couldn't do the connect the dots.

That we do with three and four year olds in preschool.

And that day.

I broke down and cried.

And, I honestly think.

It took me 2 or 3 days to recover from that.

And my sister Geraldine had called me one day, wanted me to pray for her, and I said she, that she wasn't feeling well.

And I said, I'm in the hospital.

The left side of my body is paralyzed and you want me to pray for you?

She said, well, there's nothing wrong with your mouth.

So.

And it wasn't anything wrong with my mouth.

I needed someone to hold my hand.

If thats the way of putting it, and needed to just, feel somebody else who knew what I was going through.

So I don't have a job.

I don't have a husband.

But I'm really fortunate.

My son is doing really well.

So when he turned 15 and got his, learner's permit in North Carolina, you're required to have a licensed driver in the car.

And I was still licensed.

I wasn't competent to drive, and I didn't drive, but I still had a license.

So I sat in the front seat while he learned to drive.

And then as.

My reaction times and my ability to pay attention to the left improved.

And I went through the learner's permit process.

He got to sit and help me relearn how to drive.

And that laugh because he found that imaginary brake pedal really, really quickly.

But I do feel like it brought my son and I much closer together.

Life is good.

It needs to be appreciate it and work at it.

We got to work a little harder then some people who haven't had a stroke.

When I was in medical school, the idea was that the brain really doesn't repair itself, doesn't make new neurons.

One of my doctors even told me, well, you know, you kind of get this great improvement up to about a year.

And then after that, things kind of love a while, and you can't really expect much more improvement.

And that's not true.

There's so much that we didn't know.

So what gives me hope the most is that I don't think my recovery is over.

I'm five years out now.

And I'm still getting better.

Don't forget to wait to force your body to do this and to wait and step.

Good Simon.

I went into hospital with my stroke at the age of 52.

I came out two weeks later or three weeks later at the age of 72.

It's like I just gained 20 years All of a sudden.

That was the impact of this stroke.

I mean, he'd almost be in tears because when it was meal time, they would wheel him out in a wheelchair in this sort of, you know, big meal area there.

And he said, I hate going there.

I want my meals in my room.

I hate it, he said, I hate looking at all those old people that look just like me.

As the patriarch, I like to think I was.

I'm no longer that.

You know, but somebody that was working 60- 70 hours a week and not even thinking about it to somebody that can barely do three hours a day now.

It's pretty huge.

You can do this.

You got to give yourself a chance, but you can do it.

I told you from the beginning nothing about this session was going to be easy.

I was going to push you, and we're going to work hard.

But you can do it.

Right.

Yes.

Yes.

But it's not hard.

Its not hard effort hard.

Its hard, knack hard.

It's hard mentally.

It's one of these things again.

It is.

Yeah.

There's a lot going on that you got to put together all at one time.

You are absolutely right.

But in the end it'll be worth it, right?

Yeah, I hope so.

Many people may perceive RHD to be less severe or less disabling than a left hemisphere stroke, and this is largely based on the fact that adults with RHD have fluent and intelligible communication.

Consequently, many people with RHD may not have the social supports.

As someone who has had a left hemisphere stroke because they are still able to talk.

I think the longer you work with these patients, the more they open up about the struggles that they're facing, rather than hiding them or masking them or even ignoring them.

They always stress like we are the same, but we're not.

And sometimes we might need a little bit more help.

And I know them living their whole lives, being able to do things alone.

It's harder for them now to want to ask for help, because they want to do it by themselves, because they know they could at one point.

One day they could do all these things and now they can't anymore.

and so it's all about those small, those small little, wins for them.

My name is Hugh Parks, and, my family, we originally come from Kentucky My name is Laura Parks.

And my, Hugh, my husband is a stroke survivor.

I was always busy as an engineer working, and, I'd say on the abusive side, I just thought that he hadn't had enough sleep.

and so he ended up taking a nap.

And when he woke up, when he woke up from his nap, he was obvious that he couldn't move his left side.

Eventually, one day seemed to catch up to me after I had a stroke.

That was, when I call hard reset Returning to life at home was, overwhelming.

I was totally responsible for things that I'd never been responsible before.

we added in, a bathroom on the first floor.

Our house is not made for a stroke survivor.

We put in a ramp.

We, for the physical limitations.

It can be overwhelming.

Every man who talked to me after Hugh had his stroke offered to mow our lawn, which I thought was funny.

I'm kind of like a permanent Covid patient... in isolation.

But with Covid, we all masked up and stayed home or avoided crowds and things.

And for someone that doesn't independently drive or get around...

I'm totally dependent on my wife or caregiver to, take me somewhere if I need to go or to communicat with me.

If we were in a group of people, he was a little slow to respond, and he would fixate on some things that he wanted to say, but then he would inject it into the conversation at the wrong point in time.

So it was always a little awkward with the communicating.

There's not as a single protocol for recovering from stroke, so it's not like you push these three buttons and you'll b back to normal and within a year two or whatever.

So there may be misperceptions that you can work yourself away or out of a stroke by just pumping iron or whatever, but it's not that way.

The, brain is very different than just a torn- a twisted ankle or something.

I think that awareness of the impairments by the stroke survivors, as well as their loved ones and the health professionals, is the first step to actually making progress with, with our knowledge, with our abi to develop strategic and population specific treatmen as well as assessments.

For me, I wanted my students to confident, competent speech lang pathologists.

I wanted them to know what to do when they have, a client that they are unfamiliar with or disorder that they are unfamiliar with, where do you go to make sure that you are conducting evidence based treatment sessions?

You need to know, as a clinician how can I make sure my sessions are effective and that my clients will, demonstrate progress?

So should I eat it with a knife still in my hand?

Oh.

You thought I forgot about that knife.

I did!

(Laughter) What should I do with it?

You should put it in the sink.

Over the semester, I just felt increasingly happy to spend time with her.

And I felt more and more like I was able to support her communication and carry out conversations with her.

Well, we turned to a seemingly very simple task in 45 steps.

Part of the reason we did this was because I wanted to see you break down a task into a bunch of little steps.

Which you did a fantastic job of doing might I add.

And see how we can pay attention to some of those little details and describe a task like that.

I thought it was fun.

Did you think it was fun?

It was, it was.

Good, did it make you think?

Thats exactly what it did.

Okay, good.

Hello.

My name is Teresa Tharrington.

I'm from Creedmoor, North Carolina.

Life before my stroke.

I worked at Blue Cross and Blue Shield in North Carolina.

I had my stroke.

At three oclock in the morning.

October 13th, 2011.

I was sleep and my husband said he heard me making a noise.

I was like a gurgling sound.

I don't remember any of it.

I did inpatient treatment at Duke Regional Hospital and then I came home.

I had to rethink.

You know, she has a new, new.

I got a new new now.

It's taught me a lot about.

Compromise and doing different.

Doing things a different way.

Just not being able to go like I used to go.

How I used to go.

That's a that's a big loss.

I still dont have use of my left arm, but other than that I do very well.

The clinicians I had, they weren't... they wasn't having it.

They were determined that I was gonna participate and not just be a spectator.

Just because I had the stroke doesn't mean that I'm less than I used to be.

I think I'm just.

I'm just just as important as I was before... maybe a little bit more important because I see things differently than I used to, and I do things differently than I used to.

A lot of people see the end resu They don't know what it took to get there.

She had to learn just because she had a stroke, the stroke didn't have her.

I meet people and they're not.

They're not as progressed as I am.

And when I tell them that October will be ten years that I had my stroke and they say, you've had you had a stroke ten years ago, and you talk like that and you walk like that.

There is hope for me.

And I say, yes, there is hope for you.

I'm still alive.

God has got me here for a reason, and I'm going to continue to do what he wants me to do.

Reaching that point at the end of the semester where she was opening up to me and we were laughing and telling jokes, it just it felt so good and it felt very rewarding.

It felt like all the time and ef we had spent through the semester was really paying off.

In the moment its hard to think about all the progress you're making, or the fact that you are helping them make that progress, but when your client does something like that, it just makes you think about, oh my gosh, we started here and now here we are not even just two months later.

Through this experience, I was able to really I don't know, put a face to it, if that makes sense, and put a story behind it.

I think there's very much a stereotype, still, when you hear stroke and it's all the characteristics of a left hemisphere stroke, and that just is what comes to people's mind.

And so I almost wonder if there's part of RHD that still exists that's kind of an invisible diagnosis.

We're not aware that communication extends well beyond the ability to articulate words.

It extends way beyond the ability to put sentences together grammatically.

It is the ability to use language and speech appropriately for a particular context.

And that gets lost in the midst of more overt changes in communication.

I think if I was to think, oh, this is the end of the world, I would want to pick up a gun and shoot myself in this land of the guns.

Whereas, I think for the most part, I've been upbeat, optimistic, and I think I've been optimistic because I see it more as a gradual realization that, you know, this was a rotten thing that's happened to us, but it's affected the whole family in a major way.

There's this misnomer about recovery.

I think you need to change the word.

We need a new word.

We don't want to be talking about recovery or what's recovery.

It's such a subjective word, isn't it?

I will never be able to recover to the level of a normal person or the normal.

Simon that I was before the stroke hit me.

That's never going to happen, but I know I'm going to be better than I am today.

By meeting these people and and and keeping in touch with these people brings home the fact that you are not alone.

That others are going through the same struggles you are, and they're battling it n their own ways.

And and you get empowerment through that.

That helps.

It helps with your own mindset and positivity of recovery.

I feel.

Absolutely that.

You know...

I've lost a lot of my old friend but I've gained an awful lot of new friends.