Speak Out!

My first day of speech therapy, using the Speak Out! Program from the Parkinson’s Voice Project. This is a nonprofit group committed to preserving speech and swallowing in people with Parkinson’s. Both of these things are going to shit for me, so I’m happy to participate. If you get a referral from your speech therapist, they will send you a workbook for free. You can also donate a bit to help others access the program. The idea is to speak with intent, loudly and strongly.

I have always had a deep, strong voice. When I coached youth soccer I was told parents could hear me three fields away. Now a person in the same room will frequently say “huh?” when I say something. Sometimes I cannot turn up the volume so I started speech therapy with my free workbook in hand.

The first part of each day’s lesson are warm-up exercises. These involved mooing like a cow, and then opening wide and saying “ahh” as if you were at the dentist. And then take the “ahh” up to the falsetto and then back down. After each attempt at these, my therapist would say, “good, now do it within intent.” She kept saying that. Soon she was saying it when I would answer her questions. “So do you have any pets?” “No,” I would answer. For which she would emphatically reply, “with intent!” By the end of the session I was saying everything with the intent of shutting her up.

Next came the counting exercises. The workbook says to say the numbers in a smooth and connected way. To project my voice “up and over.” “Up and over what?”I asked? “Up, over and past me - like when you used to conduct business meetings when you worked.” I was starting to regret telling her anything about my life. “1…2…3…” I yelled up, over and past her. Of course her only comment, “Good, now this time with intent.”

My speech therapist looks to be just a couple of years older than my daughter, who is a senior in college. So I decided to speak like I spoke to my daughter when she was learning to drive. Of course, that was when my daughter was16 and had her head down in her phone not listening to me. So as we headed toward the workbook reading exercises, I had a new intent, to be heard and save my car! “Good morning!”…“Come over here”…“It’s time to go”… “Let’s go home.” “Perfect” said my therapist, and it stayed that way the right right up through the final cognitive exercises.

So if any of you who have been parents, or married for that matter, and tried to get your child or spouse to listen, well you already know the Speak Out! techniques. I thought they were just ignoring me all this time, but they were actually preparing me for having a degenerative brain disease. So the next time they ignore me I will say, “thank you.” But say it with intent.

To learn more about the Parkinson’s Voice Project click HERE.