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
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“It is not stressful circumstances, as such, that do harm to children. Rather, it is the quality of their interpersonal relationships and their transactions with the wider social and material environment that lead to behavioral, emotional, and physical health problems. If stress matters, it is in terms of how it influences the relationships that are important to the child.”
—Felton Earls (20th century)
“The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast- off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We have to give ourselves—men in particular—permission to really be with and get to know our children. The premise is that taking care of kids can be a pain in the ass, and it is frustrating and agonizing, but also gratifying and enjoyable. When a little kid says, “I love you, Daddy,” or cries and you comfort her or him, life becomes a richer experience.”
—Anonymous Father. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 3 (1978)