SOURCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL CASE
• In the novel, Aphasia, My World Alone (1979), Helen Wulf gives her personal experience of having Aphasia and how this sudden and unexpected loss of communication has affected her life. Helen Wulf is a wife, mother, former business owner, as well as an accomplished author. Her personal account of having Aphasia sheds some light on the nature of this disorder and the difficulties accompanied by it.

COMMUNICATION-RELATED FEATURES OF THE DISORDER
• Talking is not easy for Helen Wulf. It’s exhausting and it can’t be done fast. Rather than an unconscious flow of words, she deliberately has to think of the words she has to say and her speaking sounds inebriated and stilted. This makes her narratives hard to follow …show more content…
For example, if she wanted to say the word “globe”, but her brain could not find this word, the substitution would be “map in the round”.
• Helen also struggles with understanding speech. She first realized this one night in the hospital when her doctor tried to explain what happened to her but she simply could not comprehend what was being said to her.

AETIOLOGY
• Helen’s busy and on-the-go life was forever changed on February 3, 1970. On this day, Helen suffered a stroke that damaged the parts of her brain responsible for speech and language.

ASSESSMENT/DIAGNOSES
• Helen was first assessed by a neurologist in the hospital who asked her a few simple questions such as her name was and age. Once Helen was discharged from the hospital, she was referred to a Speech-Language Pathologist. The Speech-Language Pathologist first assessed Helen’s ability to produce natural speech by assessing her fluency and how clearly she spoke by simply asking Helen to tell him a little bit about herself and what she liked to do. This proved to be difficult for Helen since she was still recovering from her stroke, and therefore her ability to speak and comprehend speech was still difficult for