This King’s Speech – Part 6

After about thirty years after my last session with a speech therapist, I found myself searching for a new one earlier this summer.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for in the experience of meeting with a speech therapist. However, I did know that I wanted to do something about how I felt about my speech. I wondered if getting a professional opinion on my speech would help me better understand how I talked and how I could talk.

Maybe an evaluation would lead to speech therapy sessions that could give me more strategies to pronounce certain words more normally. Maybe I could improve the way I talked, and my perceived deficiencies would bring me less stress and anxiety. And maybe I would learn that there was nothing wrong with how I spoke and that this was all in my head. After spending my life uncomfortable with how I talked, this last possibility seemed unlikely.

There are a lot of speech therapists in my area, but very few who do adult therapy. So, as I looked through therapist websites, I chose one who had experience with children, adults, and English language learners. I liked how she wrote about her work on her website, so I gave her a call.

She didn’t answer, so I left a message. A week passed, so I left another message. I was ready to move on at this point, but I had a feeling that I needed to be patient. So I programmed her phone number as a contact in my phone to make sure I would recognize her when she called me back.

The following week she did.

I was hanging out with Lucas when she called, and I was excited to greet her. First, she apologized for not returning my call earlier. She had just returned from a trip and was catching up on things. Then, after introducing myself briefly, she explained that she didn’t have much time to talk and wanted to schedule a more extended phone call. I said that was fine. Then, she asked me to go a little deeper into why I wanted to meet with a speech therapist.

I told her about struggling to be understood as a child and having speech therapy. I explained how some sounds still feel challenging to say and that I substitute words to avoid saying words with “r” sounds. I talked about people mishearing my name when I introduce myself.  She asked me about my work, so I told her about my school and students.

I noticed that half an hour had passed, and I wondered about what she had said before about only having time for a brief phone call. After I came to the end of a thought, she told me that while she didn’t hear any speech issues over the phone, and she said I was very articulate.  However, there were possibly things she was missing and that she would be happy to meet with me. She explained that she wanted to do my evaluation with another speech therapist because my case was unique, and she felt that this would benefit me the most.

I told her this sounded good.

A couple of weeks later, I walked into her office, and after a brief chat, the evaluation began.