Eli Dimsey and his speech-language pathologist, Beth Ann Norvell (Photo by Jay Paul)
Eli Dimsey makes a long story short.
“Truck driver accident,” says Dimsey, a gregarious 37-year-old with a ready smile. “Then — no, no — wait. Miami.”
“Orlando,” prompts Beth Ann Norvell, Dimsey’s speech-language pathologist.
“Orlando. And, uh, a coma. Then aphasia. Wait — stroke. F--ked up,” he mouths.
Norvell laughs. Some words come more easily than others, she explains. What Dimsey’s trying to say is that the accident in 2011 severed part of his carotid artery, causing a stroke.
“Stroke … no problem,” Dimsey says. “Aphasia … really hard.”
That’s why Dimsey’s here, in Ellwood Thompson’s café on a Tuesday afternoon, along with a dozen other people who share the condition. They gather simply to speak, or to listen. Word by word, they inch their way back to where they were — or as close as they can get.
Aphasia is the loss of language stemming from a brain injury, most commonly a stroke. It’s a constellation of challenges: Word retrieval, the ability to carry on a conversation, reading comprehension, listening comprehension and writing all may be affected.
Two million people in the United States live with aphasia, yet many Americans have never heard of it. “The very people that are affected, what’s affected about them is communication, so they can’t advocate for themselves,” says Jan Thomas, leader of the RVA Aphasia group.
Thomas was working as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer in Richmond when she suffered a stroke in 2010. When she woke after surgery, her right side was paralyzed, and she couldn’t speak. Thomas regained most of the use of her right arm and leg, but speech was slow to return. She realized her old life — the life of delicate negotiations, of easy eloquence — had ended.
“Words were important to me, always,” she says. “So when I couldn’t speak, it was like my world was ripped away.” Aphasia doesn’t slow her thoughts, only her words. It’s as if a faucet’s gushing in her brain, Thomas says, but when she opens her mouth, speech “dribbles out.”
Because socializing is so difficult, many people with aphasia simply withdraw from life. That’s why the RVA Aphasia group was formed in 2012, when the daughter of a patient at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center asked three speech pathologists to help her start a support group. It has grown from six to around 40 active members, and holds regular social and informational meetings.
In August, four members of the group spoke to the Richmond Police Academy about their condition, which many officers had never heard of. If a police officer pulls over someone with aphasia, “they might think they’re drunk, or high, because they look fine but they can’t really speak,” Thomas explains. Because of this, some people with aphasia carry an ID card that explains the condition.
Aphasia is exhausting. Thomas describes walking into Lowe’s and trying to explain what she’s looking for to a store associate who can’t understand. That’s what’s so wonderful about the group, she says: Everyone else has been there, too. “The group can’t do therapy, per se, but it is an environment where everybody understands. And just … can be.”
When Dimsey first started coming to the group he was silent, intimidated by the setting, Norvell recalls. Since then, his recovery has been remarkable. He works part time as a stocker at Walgreens. He has his own apartment. He drives. And he draws. After his stroke, he learned how to draw using his left hand, and creates lifelike animal portraits and detailed illustrations. One, he says, represents his brain: It shows a tree, one side bare-branched, the other teeming with life.
Eli with one of his illustrations; he says the tree represents his brain. (Photo by Jay Paul)
He knows how much he has lost. One of his favorite phrases is “back in the day.” Back in the day, he was the good guy, he says. “Good stuff.” And later: “All the women — back in the day. Yeah!”
“He’s very, very outgoing,” Norvell says. “He’s very extroverted. And so he’s gotten super brave. He will go out on a Friday night on his own. ... However, I think it’s really hard.”
“Girl … it’s hard,” Dimsey says, pantomiming what it’s like when he meets someone new. “ ‘Aphasia? What’s that?’ Communication. Different.”
That’s all he can say.
The RVA Aphasia group meets the second Thursday of each month at 6 p.m., in addition to coffee gatherings every other Tuesday afternoon. Find more information on the group’s Facebook page, or contact Jan Thomas at jan.thomas@hotmail.com to be added to the mailing list.
