The unexpected was exactly what happened.
Meredith had filled in for Tori before, so I wasn't surprised to see her at first. Our Speech therapies hadn't gone well at the beginning, though that was hardly her fault. Meredith tried to comfort me while I cried about something I don't remember now. She did everything she could think of to get me to stop. However, I do remember that I was inconsolable. We hadn't learned about lability yet, and therefore couldn't tell any of the therapists about it. Meredith was just unlucky enough to have me first on a crying day.
But before we knew it, Meredith was my new Speech therapist. She was the therapist for all of my personal doctor's patients, but I didn't know that. I knew that patients changed therapists all the time, and in fact I've changed outpatient therapists myself several times as well. But I thought at the time that Tori was just tired of me. That was okay. I figured a change would happen sooner or later. I was simply happy it hadn't happened to Fred or Lyndsay, too. That's what I was really worried about. The truth of the matter was, though, that Tori was busy scheduling the other Speech therapists, and was too busy to have patients herself. So she gave all the patients she shared with my particular personal doctor to anyone who had time in their schedule to handle them, and that's how I ended up with Meredith.
Changing to Meredith in the middle of my therapy was interesting. It was nice to do something different as well as the things I had been doing. Meredith and I read cards to the games 'Trivial Pursuit' and 'Life Signs,' both of which I liked a lot. They were fun to play, but I liked the conversations we had the best. We just talked for the entire half hour. I remember that I was amazed when the entire thirty minutes were gone on the days we had conversations! We talked on the day I changed rooms, even though talking about the change was fairly upsetting to me. We even discussed the room change (Meredith was as much my counselor as my therapist, as all my therapists were), but such a thing wasn't worth an explanation when we were having such a good time. It was often like that in therapy. I still can't explain things, not because I can't understand events and attach language to them, but because I don't have the air support for a long, drawn out explanation that has any hope of being intelligible. So I simply say 'I don't know' a lot. 'Yesterday' is also useful, if only I can say that darn letter 's,' which, at least half the time, I can't.
Meredith was younger than I am, as all the therapists were, but she was very knowledgeable about my nasality. In layman's terms, 'nasality' means that I had a lot of air escaping through my nose, like a leaky tire, and she made such an escape her specialty. We worked hard on my nasality, but there was not much either of us could do about it, since I refused to wear a prosthetic device called a palatal lift (I was already wearing enough splints at the time, and I was tired both of wearing them and of being a convenient 'guinea pig' to try different things out on. I was not always a very congenial patient). But she was forever giving Don and me a handout that she had printed out on nasality. She hoped to change my mind with all the information I was amassing, but nothing worked, as I was as determined not to wear one as she was determined to convince me to wear one. It was all for my own good, of course, but I was already wearing splints at night for OT and PT. A prosthetic device for Speech, too, was just too much.
What amazed me was that, despite her young age, Meredith managed to keep the conversations going so effortlessly. She must have known a lot of tricks about her job, or she knew the right questions to ask. Whatever the case, she knew enough to keep the conversational ball rolling. And it seemed to roll along effortlessly, even if all I was really doing was answering questions. At least I didn't say, 'Nevermind!'
Next: Don