« Anomic Aphasia »
Note: This essay is in progress.
Executive Brief: Sometimes I cannot retrieve the word that I want, and it will be right there, usually stuck in my head behind a similar word. It used to only be proper nouns, and even then it was only the names of specific people; however, over the last decade or so, the loss has increasingly involved more common words. Even though I am an SLP, I did not recognize the dysfunction for what it is until the frequency increased and it intruded upon that common vocabulary… plus I started to see it more often in my elderly mom.
Details…
With common words, this is still a relatively infrequent occurrence (maybe once every few days), so it is still mild.
Common vocabulary or not, the condition is exacerbated by stress.
The thing is, anomic aphasia is supposed to be associated with brain damage, whether traumatic or degenerative; certainly, a toll has been exacted by cancer treatment, four bouts of COVID, and just plain aging. And I have had occasional head injuries, although nothing that seemed to be a big deal… until I start going, “Oh yeah, well that was probably a concussion, and I didn’t come around for a couple of minutes that other time,” and so on. And then there was the claw end of a hammer to my skull when I was 5 years old… but that didn’t knock me out or anything. All of which (or at least much… or maybe just some) is documented in my previous book.
But I’ve had this problem since I was a kid, before almost any of those events ever occured.
And it just occurs to me now that I experienced this during a standardized spelling test in high school, which is a story that I tell elsewhere, but the gist is that I absolutely could not spell ‘of’ because ‘uv’ was stuck in my mind; it was the second item on the test, and the only word that I got wrong.
So I’ve been wondering whether my severe sleep issues were damaging or otherwise traumatic for my neurology since that has been with me right from the very beginning, and then all the way through my mid-30s.
Or it might just be related to my savancy, and the sheer volume of stored information with which I deal with all the time.
I just don’t know.
I do know that I feel embarrased when I can’t remember words associated with my profession in a work setting. It gives the impression that I am not as familiar with the topic as I should be. I can have written an entire tutorial on the subject, and then in a stressful conversation not be able to remember the word for it. I can remember words that sound like it, and words for things similar to it. But the desired path is blocked.
So I have to resort to circumlocutions and apologies.
2024-12