We started the day with new friends Felisa and Chris.

Christine is one of the founders and really great at taking pictures, among many many other talents and skills. She has the blue and white shirt on.

Our second session this morning was led by a speech pathologist who just returned from some training at the Aphasia Institute in Toronto. She shared some of the slides they use when training health care professionals to better serve people with aphasia. She has lots of techniques for supported conversation between the person with aphasia and their communication partner.

After lunch, we went to a session on Zoom, the video conferencing platform that Zack’s been using since January. Other attendees are brand new to it so while they were getting up to speed, Zack filled out his raffle tickets. Afterward, he learned how to screen share and use the virtual whiteboard, which will help him share pictures of ski adventures etc. as well as write out words he can’t produce.

The last session of the day was putting name tags (little labels with attendees’ pictures and names) on a map of the US to help everyone continue to orient themselves to each other. Angie spends the summers in Sparks and winters in Palm Springs, CA. She and Zack are the NV contingent here. Both learned about ARC, the organization running this week, through the Not Alone Aphasia Support Group, which is run by Tami Brancamp at UNR.

David is the fellow sitting in the picture. He had his stroke when he was 10 and his mom is one of the co-founders. Briane is on the right and she’s the SLP who was just at the Aphasia Institute.

We were on our own for dinner so we went to Hofbrauhaus with 9 of our new friends. 

All of us!

The obligatory stein toast.

Background noise doesn’t affect Zack at all but it’s common for people with aphasia to not be able to concentrate and sometimes even tolerate it. The Hofbrahaus has nothing but background noise, mostly in the form of a traditional (What do I know?) accordion kind of live band. And then there’s this guy! It definitely added to the overall ambiance. 🙂

Lastly, an attendee and her husband made up these business cards for people with aphasia to share awareness. They gave each of the other attendees a stack. We’re lucky to be among a very generous group.