In this film you will see and hear former stroke patients and their carers who have experienced Aphasia. Aphasia is a speech and language problem which sometimes occurs following a stroke. Aphasia affects the person’s ability to use and understand spoken and written language.

Frank and Pauline
Pauline:

“At that specific time, it was like oh, there must be something going on for him to sort of…”

“And I say every day was just the same thing. He couldn’t talk properly and it seemed to be getting worse, not better. Nothing seemed to be getting easier with it. Whether it’s because we didn’t know and it was still happening, but obviously like, he was on no medication or whatever so the speech was getting worse.”

“And all of a sudden he would say to me – well can you not just tell me what I need to say? I’d say no, I don’t know what’s in your head. I’ve not had training to know what you want to say. And then it was, like, well I started saying or knowing what words he would want, so I started saying them and he would go, well I don’t need you to help me. Well in fact make your mind up. Do you want my help or don’t you want my help? Obviously at that time he didn’t know. He didn’t know what he wanted.”

Frank:

“I couldn’t understand what I was wanting to say. I knew I was trying to say something, but I couldn’t have a memory. My brain wasn’t allowing me to remember even what I was going to start to say in the first place. And it was, well give me a hint, tell me something. Tell me something to say something so that I can remember it. It wasn’t there.”

Question:

So what was the turning point for both of you? Did that happen at the same time or different times?

Pauline:

“We had one major row didn’t we?. There was a time that we sort of… We weren’t coping with it at all”.

Frank:

“It was bad because I couldn’t understand Pauline. Pauline couldn’t understand me.”