A year and eight months later, I wrote in a letter to Angela Manssolillo, my former speech therapist: Something happened recently that made me remember my months at Mercy Hospital. I met a woman who also had a stroke. She too is unable to use one arm, and she wears a leg brace like mine. “You speak so bue—tee—ful—lee,” this new friend said to me, speaking with slow deliberation, still struggling with every sound seven years after her stroke. “You speak so bue—tee—ful—lee,” she said, and I remembered sitting across from you in the small computer room next to the nurse’s station. “Will I ever be able to speak without so much effort?” I asked. I had spent half an hour reading to you while you wrote a list of the words I had the most difficulty pronouncing. Please, I thought, please tell me that I will not always have to live with my voice imprisoned like this. Please tell me that I won’t always feel exhausted, trapped, fearful. You looked me in the eyes and answered with honesty and warmth — “I don’t know.”

After wheeling myself down the hospital corridor for my first appointment with Angela, I stopped abruptly at the doorway to her office. I couldn’t make myself cross the threshold into that small, windowless space. Breathe deeply, I told myself, trying to do my childbirth breathing exercise, an exercise I’d since used to calm myself before giving poetry readings. Breathe deeply. But I couldn't breathe at all. Maybe, I thought, I am suffocating, maybe fear has sucked all the air from my lungs.

“I can’t work in this room.”

I don’t know what Angela was thinking about the newly paralyzed, panic-stricken woman facing her from a hospital wheelchair. Did she understand the claustrophobia as a merciful projection of my paralysis onto her office? One could move from an office.

Which is what we did. Angela didn’t attempt to reason me out of my fears. She simply smiled warmly and assured me that she would find a space in which I would feel comfortable. The next day we met in the computer room behind the nurses’ station. The room wasn’t large but it was flooded with light from a large window. Every day for the next two months, for thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the afternoon I sat next to that window as I worked with Angela, learning to speak again. Initially there were a lot of written tests though I can remember nothing of them now except that I disliked taking them. I felt like a little child in grade school, nervous about performing well for the teacher. And I told no one that I could no longer recite the alphabet.

Speaking, I rolled my r’s, and at each syllable uttered, I spit like an actor in the No Theatre in Japan. Though I had spoken with a thick Southern drawl before my stroke, I now spoke with what sounded like a trace of a German accent. My new speech was squeezed dry of emotion. It sounded flat and mechanical, and was punctuated with struggle-filled hesitations. Often I would kid Angela about going on the road to give poetry readings in this style as if it were something purposefully developed for my performance. In truth I couldn’t imagine ever again giving public readings.

To lose my ability to walk was to lose all sense of safety. Who would come when I needed to be propped up in the bed so I wouldn’t choke on a sip of water, or when I needed a bedpan or a blanket? To lose my ability to walk was to be thrown back to memoriesof being an infant left in a closed room for hours, screaming. To lose use of my left arm and hand felt like a cruel amputation. But I have always been in love with the human voice with its tonal variations, hesitations, cadences; with what it holds of the geography of one’s beginnings, and of the experiences that lead one to choose the particular words through which one lives. I needed my leg. I needed my arm. I needed my hand. But in a fundamental way I was my voice. The loss of that voice felt like a diminishment of soul.

A booklet explaining apraxia lay under a pile of books where I’d hidden it. As long as I didn’t read it, as long as I didn’t put words to what had happened to my voice, my own acknowledgment of it didn’t have to cut so deeply. I could postpone the pain of acceptance. In the meantime, I spent evenings in bed, pronouncing the words with which I’d had the most difficulty that day—countenance, munificent, ignorance, diminished, eloquent. I stumbled over sounds, slurred, stuttered, began again.

Six weeks after my stroke, I got the booklet out and read its definition of apraxia — “A movement planning problem involving a disruption in sequencing of voluntary movements. A transmission problem between the brain and the muscle.” Apraxia, I said aloud, allowing myself to feel the pain evoked at the sound of that word. It was the pain of a grief too large for my body to hold. I felt as if a weight was pressing against my sternum while in my chest, a great and ragged emptiness was struggling against the bone. Apraxia, I repeated and felt the pain contract and travel to my throat where it throbbed in a hard knot. My eyes burned. I rolled my wheelchair to the empty dining room and parked at a table near a window. On the fourteenth of June I wrote my first poem after the stroke:

Apraxia

Copyright © 2003 Margaret Robison