Words, Words, and Gobbledygook

Words are a passion of mine. I have been in love with words ever since I was a child and they were undecipherable mysteries, lines and curves arranged on pages. To me a book was filled with possibility and this translated at a young age into a love of theater. The best of worlds: words and performance. I could take the words I would turn over in my head and bring them to life—listening to their sound, the rhythm of a sentence. When you have a left-hemisphere stroke chances are your language centers, roughly defined as the Broca and the Wernicke parts of the brain (although new research has shown language is a whole-brain activity) will be impacted in a negative way. We engage with language in three general ways:

1. we receive it and decode it (using hearing or visuospatial aspects of our brain + memory + Wernicke’s speech center);
2. we produce speech (using Broca’s region—a combination of motor + language- and context-specific memory—roughly); and
3. we read it.

In a left-hemisphere stroke any one of these areas can be a problem temporarily or permanently. When I had my strokes, I had Broca and Wernicke strokes among many other types in other regions of the brain.

I have permanent damage in the speech production and reception regions. With damage to Broca I move between being frustrated because I cannot form the right words and it comes out all jumbled together or I cannot find the right words to say in the first place. I think everyone can relate to challenges in Broca. Most people have had moments in their life where they say the wrong words, mispronounce words, or simply cannot find the words to speak in the moment. For me, it just occurs a bit more often than the average person. What is most frustrating for me is the damage in my Wernicke region.

It took years to figure out it was not a problem with my hearing but a problem with decoding what was said to me. When I had my first stroke in this region, I described it as a Charlie Brown moment. Everyone started to sound further and further away and their words became mumbles like the adults in Charlie Brown. Everyone had a case of the “Mwa Mwas”. After I was stabilized and the clot broke apart or just continued into a larger blood vessel and stopped bothering my brain, the damage was done—subtly. And it came in appearance of hearing loss.

I say “what” a lot. I have days when I can’t understand what is being communicated to me. Words sound run together with only 1 or 2 distinguishable words in the process. And the more stressed I am, the worse it gets. When I said “what”, no matter how many times the person says the same sentence I still hear it as undecipherable. This then leads to a frustrating situation of the person speaking louder and getting more annoyed because I still don’t understand. As such, I find myself now saying something like “can you rephrase that?” If, of course, I can remember that phrase in the moment.

Yet, I have found there is a general loss of recent years. There is a sluggishness in my overall comprehension. And that translates to my writing as much as it translates to my speaking and listening. It is hard to describe the sensation that happens, but it is as if I am pushing against a heavy wall with all of my weight and it barely budges. I find myself staring at the screen for thirty minute stretches of time, the laptop heating up my lap, as I try to figure out what I’m going to say and what I’ve already said. What used to take minutes, takes hours. Words simply do not flow as they once did in my brain. They move like a car in heavy traffic, where everyone is tailgating. Start, stop, start, stop, stop, stop, stop, start… I also describe it as if I’ve hit a wall of words—I am too close to distinguish them all and must step back and carefully read aloud in my mind so that I understand what is being said.

There is a sadness when I think about my life in theater surrounded by beautiful words, by rhythm, by fluency. It is a world that is far away now, a lifetime ago. In the place of these beautiful moments are episodic periods of gobbledygook and mwa mwas. All because of small bits of damage to the delicate, spongey tissue that is my brain.