Speech Language Pathologist

>> My name is Susana Bird [assumed spelling] and I am a speech language pathologist, and I work at Baptist Hospital in Oxford, Mississippi. And I see several different types of patients a day, mostly geriatric patients. And we do evaluations of speech flow and language disorders and also treatments of those diagnoses. In the geriatric population or the older population, most of our caseload will consist of strokes, CVAs. And so, what we encounter is a language disorder typically with a stroke. There's several different kinds of strokes, and so it affects different parts of the brain. A language disorder, it can be expressive language or receptive language. Expressive language is whether or not they can find the words that they want to say. If you ask them to repeat a word and they count to ten instead. And then receptive language is they may be able to talk fluently, but they don't understand what other people are saying. They may not understand directions or yes or no questions or any kind of communication, for that matter. Well, I am fortunate enough to be able to work part-time. And so I go in at 8:30 in the morning and I'm able to leave work between 2:00 and 3:00 every afternoon. The other therapists are eight-hour shifts, just 8:30 to 4:30. At Baptist, we also have an acute rehab unit. And those, we get patients that are more medically stable but that are not yet ready to go home. And so we try to prepare them to go home, to get them to be as independent as possible, or as independent as they were before. Whatever happened to them, whether it's a broken hip, a subdermal hematoma, a CVA. So typically, I spend an hour with each patient in the rehab unit. And a lot of times, we do a lot of cognition therapy, because we do get the broken hips, and sometimes with patients that have an early onset dementia, we'll see that when they come in, after they've had their hip fixed. And so as far as cognition goes, we do problem solving, memory, orientation, executive functioning, things that we do on a normal daily basis without realizing it. Like counting change and writing checks and balancing a checkbook. Reading prescription labels and things like that. And so we work on cognitive functioning. And then we do a lot of evaluations, whether it's dysphasia evaluations, speech and language evaluations or cognitive evaluations. And those typically take about 30 minutes or so, and then we document their baseline, which is where they are as far as the evaluation goes. And then we write goals for the patient, where we think they can go after their course of therapy. So--