A speech pathologist...

Even though I have only been competing in the Miss America Organization for a year, I have been promoting my platform for much longer.  My life's passion turned into my platform; therefore, my platform is my life's passion.  Five years ago, I began my studies in speech-language pathology.  Like many people, I was not completely certain what I was getting myself into or where it would take me.  However, I did know that everything I learned about the profession, I loved!  This gave me confidence that I would love working in the field and would remain interested in my work for my entire life.  Little did I know that it would soon be my passion and life's calling.  Speech-language pathology is such a wide field of work and promotes life-long learning, which is good news for someone who has always loved being in school.

For the past 2 weeks, I have been working in the hospital setting and one of the things I hear most often is "Why do I have speech therapy?  I talk fine!"  I think this is many people's first reaction when they hear that they are going to work with speech therapy, but little do they know that we may work on speech, but we also target language, memory, cognition, and swallowing (to name a few).  As a result, I have been providing quite a bit of patient and family education regarding speech therapy, the anatomy/physiology of the brain, the swallow, and the impact of strokes/serious surgery on these.

I decided to share some of this education on my blog to hopefully answer some of these questions that are asked so often post-stroke, but would be helpful for all to know.

Lesson #1: The language center of the brain is housed in the left hemisphere in the majority of the population.  Broca's area is primarily responsible for language expression, and is located in the frontal lobe.  Wernicke's area is primarily responsible for language comprehension, and is located in the temporal lobe.  These are connected through a structure known as the arcuate fasciculus.  The ability to express and comprehend language is often taken for granted, but this is a complex system and is oftentimes upset during a stroke or traumatic brain injury.  Each year 1.4 million Americans suffer a traumatic brain injury, and strokes are the third leading cause of death in the U.S.  Therefore, these issues are affecting more and more people, and this information is becoming more relevant to everyday life.