Suddenly, An Improvement in Reading

The other day, the first Christmas cards arrived at The Pink House. I brought the mail in and told Bob that we had two Christmas cards. He reached his hand out for them. He loves getting cards. So, I opened them and after my brief glance, handed them over to him and went to take the rest of the mail to my desk. When I came back, he was intently studying one of them.

This was one of those wordy Christmas cards. You know, the kind with about two paragraphs of inspirational script writing on the front. Bob was studying the front of it and I asked him, "Can you read that?"

And he said, "yes." Then, he opened the card and began studying the writing inside.

And I thought, hmmmmm.....? Because I wasn't sure if he was really reading it or not. Bob has had a terrible time with reading since the stroke. It seems he can occasionally read a single word, but has real trouble with reading a sentence, let alone a couple of paragraphs. This has always been especially heartbreaking for me, as a writer, because Bob used to be my "first reader" on any of my works. He was my "fresh pair of eyes", my typo-finder, my editor of sorts. When he first came home from the hospital, I used to pick up children's books from the library for him, but he had such a awful, heartbreaking time with them, even the "beginning readers", that I finally gave up and switched to playing Scrabble with him, which, of course, involves reading but only one word at a time.

Speech Therapy Reading Test

So I thought I'd give him a little reading test and got out one of the worksheets that Speech Therapy had left with me. These are pretty standard multiple choice type tests. The last time we worked on one of these was sometime during the summer and back then, Bob had to ask me to read the "question" part of the test and sometimes was able to pick out the right word for the answer and sometimes not... I think he was batting about 50%.

So I gave him this worksheet and told him I would not help him this time, but for him to try to figure it out on his own. He called me over, only once, pointing to the word "communication", so I told him what the word was and after that he quickly circled the word "telephone". He worked his way all the way through #7 without any more help and had every answer correct. He then missed #8 and #10, but finished the rest with flying colors.

I tell you, some days, he never ceases to amaze me.