I'm sitting in the office, with a co-worker. I was asked to read something aloud, so we could both see if it sounded ok. I just discovered I can't do that!!!!!!!!!!!

I can read. It is slow, most of the time, and after a while, it stops making sense, but I can read. I cna type and my spelling isn't too bad. I can write blogs and manuals, emails, training information, everything. What I can't seem to do is read aloud!

I can read. I know what the words are, how they should sound, and what they mean. But that information isn't getting from my head to my mouth!!!!!!!! Just nothing come out!!!!!!

At Easter, I gave a homily on one of teh 7 last words of Christ. I know I only looked at the paper once, then launched into it, but that is not unusual. By the time I am ready to do something like that, I've written and rewritten it so many times that it is so familiar to me, that I don't need notes.

I haven't actually read anything in church, or anywhere else, for that matter, since the stroke.

I'm a little freaked out. No, I'm a LOT freaked out!!!!!!!!!! I can't make the words that I am reading come out of my mouth while I read them!!!!!!!!!!

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OK,

I called Sam. He told me not to panic. I just can't read aloud....TODAY. Tomorrow might be different. Everything is going to be ok. By then he had pulled up in front of his next patient's house, so he had to get going. But he promised me everything would be ok and I believe him.

Then I called my mother. She told me to take deep breaths and relax. I just can't read....right now. She's dealt with this when my grandmother started having all of her strokes. There is OT for it and if that is what I need, then we'll get it for me. "It's just a little nerve that needs to be remineded how to do it's job." She said everything will be ok. I believe my mom.

So I'm calmer now, if still a little weirded out. I can "hear" myself reading in my head. It's just that my nouth doesn't know what to do when I try to actually put the sounds to the words. It's the freakiest thing I've run into since feeling like I was moving my face/right side in the hospital, and nothing was actually happening.

It has that same kind of disconnected from reality feeling, that is what I have not liked most about the whole stroke experience. It took me 3 weeks to feel like I was reconnected to reality after the December stroke, and a weekend to do it after the April stroke. I don't like feeling that way.

Now I don't even know if this is something that happened at the December or the April stroke! OK, I'm working myself back up again. I don't want to do that. I'm still in the office and I don't want to go home before 4 pm. Frankly, I can't go home before then. Sam has my suv today. I need to keep it together.

Why does this one little thing (and in the scheme of things, not being able to read aloud really is a significantly smaller deficit than, oh, say, not being able to walk or to talk at all) seem to weird me out so much? I just never thought I'd have a problem with it.

I've been reading since I was 3, reading aloud since that age too. I guess it was something I took for granted that would just happen when I wanted/needed it to happen. Now it seems, it isn't. Reading aloud is not "a natural" part of reading. I guess I thought it was.

I geuss I also thought I had figured out what my new normals were. Seems I still have some discovering to do.