Health
On January 2, 1999, the stroke left the active and energetic 46-year old composer, producer and businessman suddenly and seriously disabled (CT). The doctors revealed that an ischemic CVA of left MCA with hemorrhagic transformation. Paul was told he’d have to accept lasting and severe restrictions on his ability to verbally communicate, due to the post-stroke condition known as Aphasia.
Aphasia is the inability to speak, read, write or understand speech. Wilson was hospitalized at West Suburban Hospital Medical Center in Oak Park and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Subsequently, he went through rehabilitation at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Willowbrook, where he met Edie Babbitt, M.Ed. who now works with Leora Cherney, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Northwestern University Medical School, doing aphasia research.
Paul wrote:
| “ | In Oak Park Hospital and Northwestern Hospital I stayed for a month or so. Then, six months in the rehabilitation center to learn just the basic things like saying my name again, signing my signature, spelling my name, my address, brushing my teeth, all the little things that I had to learn to do all over again. | ” |
In need of a restful setting for his recuperation, Paul and his wife, Terry, relocated to Maui in Hawaii where they lived for five years. Paul eventually found and studied with Dr. Walter Tokishi, a speech therapist, but the scarcity of expert medical support to help him overcome the limitations imposed by his aphasia was still a drawback of living on Maui. In 2005, he returned to Chicago, where he began an intensive rehabilitation regimen, fiercely determined to resume his musical career.
Read more about this topic: Paul David Wilson
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—Ruth Davidson Bell. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 3 (1978)