Last Monday, I had time to look in on Mum’s OT session before heading back to Canberra after my rushed long weekend in Townsville
She’s now having showering lessons twice a week but this session was about working on her left-side neglect and spatial awareness. Because of Mum’s teaching background, she tends to “cheat” on tasks involving language – her argument being that getting a correct answer is more important than how it was obtained. We keep having to remind her that, after a stroke, it is the very literal journey that counts -far more than the outcome.
Mum can’t use those well-developed language skills on tasks involving shapes and colours so the occupational therapists have switched to shapes and patterns instead.
Bear in mind that Mum has three problems here: she has reduced vision, left-side neglect and reduced object recognition. During this session, the OT put a set of multi-coloured and shaped plastics disks in front of Mum in a randomised way. She then had to select out certain discs – all the green for example – but then all the triangles or red hearts and put them in a styrofoam cup. Having finally found all the variations, she was given a set of coloured pencils and had to arrange them by colour and colour relationships (like a rainbow with red leading to orange to yellow etc). Of course, being Mum she demanded violet because otherwise it wouldn’t be a rainbow (duh!).
Mum did well with colours, although she struggled with distinguishing similar shades (orange and red for example). She did do less well with shapes but, as Mum will tell you, shapes come after colours developmentally so we would expect them to take longer to recover. I’ve already discussed the impact a stroke can have on the brain’s ability to recognise objects so although Mum struggled more with them than with other tasks this was to be expected.
Of course, Mum’s scanning and left-side neglect continue to need work but have improved a great deal. Her “scope” of vision is wider than it has been and her left side scanning had moved further to the left than before. As with reading and other tasks, we help Mum with this by providing a border, prompting her to scan, and reminding her that objects she can’t see are likely to be on her left side.
As with everything, Mum continues to make consistent ongoing improvements and I’m hoping to see more when I go up again in a week or so.
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