Bob's First Real Book
Entry posted by SandyCaregiver
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As many of you know, after Bob's massive stroke Feb 2012, he suffered from several things that caused him to not be able to read.
1. not being able to follow a line across and his eye kept picking up words from all over the page
2. latching onto one word in a sentence and repeating it every 3 words (an aphasia thing)
3. cognition issues of trying to think how to force his brain into working and following directions
4. visual cut which causes you to miss what's on the right side
5. nearly forgot this one! - would start reading a sentence and his brain would try to fill in logical endings that made sense, but it wasn't what was written there!
In the beginning he could not even read 2 words together. He stumbled over the words like the poorest reader in 1st grade. What he did manage to read, he hopelessly said that he couldn't remember any of it anyway. I told him, there are many steps to the reading process that the brain has to sort out. You just keep doing the PROCESS of reading, and you will learn it, then your brain will have TIME to listen to what the words are saying and remember it. He started out reading just the headlines on a sports page and looking at the pictures. Then after months of that, he found he could read the first sentence in a column. The columns are very narrow, and that helped him not to lose his place so much. After about 6 more months, he noticed that he could read a little deeper into the article, before getting lost or the words becoming 'too many words'. Next I got him some great super hero books at Walmart like "5 Minute Stories" and another, just a little harder that was along the same lines but something about Super Heroes. They are rather large books, with pics on every page. But unlike many young books, there is not dark colors with print you are trying to read, and over befangled words. He began to put his nose to the grind on those, when we had the Feb 6 house flood.
Enter the Ipod Touch. I thought this would be good for him because the print could be made large enough and the width would keep it more like a newspaper article. He could hold it with one hand and tap it with his thumb. I was worried it would be too small to read, but it was not. It is a little hard to see outdoors, not quite as bad as the viewer on a dig camera, though.
Well, it's been a long 2 years and there has been so very many different things we have worked on that has finally brought him to this wonderful moment, that happened yesterday! He was on the porch reading and called to me and when I went to the porch he held the ipod out to me and said, "done!" He got this on Apr 19 and finished 258 pages on Apr 26. We went out to eat at Kroger Deli/Salad Bar to celebrate 
I told him if he keeps up with his reading, I wouldn't be surprised if in a year, he could read any of his books he wanted to! Oh, and that is a biggie! We have hundreds of books that we planned on reading 'one day' or 'when we retire'.
This was a free download to the kindle ap on amazon and you can open it there and read a preview ($0 to download) at:
http://www.amazon.co...ader_B004TPBNI0
Or you can see it at gutenburg site:
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