In December 2013, my paternal grandfather suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and fell down a flight of stairs into the basement of his New York City home. At the time, he lived with my disabled grandmother, who was unaware of his stroke/fall. The length of time he remained unconscious in the basement that night was unknown; we did not realize the damage from his brain bleed in his left frontal lobe would change his ability to communicate.

When he awoke, he began to speak jibberish - the cadence of his speech suggested he was attempting a conversation, but his sentences lacked vocabulary, were choppy and short, and his speech sounded slurred. He was admitted into the emergency room where we were informed that he was experiencing amnesia; a common side effect post-stroke. His short-term procedural memory was gone; this was his ability to remember how to make a sandwich, or how to ride a bike. His long-term episodic memory remained intact; this was his ability to remember events related to himself. This meaning, he could not remember the family he had created in this United States, but he recalled specific childhood memories from India.

As treatment ensued and he physically recovered from his fall, his cognition and speech did not. His speech was lacking appropriate grammar markers, verb tense, and function words such as “the”, “is”, “and”. He had a hard time remembering the name of a banana, he couldn’t figure out how his sons and grandchildren were related to him, and he could not tell the time on a clock. Although his English language was damaged, his Hindi language remained intact. He could read and write his name in Hindi but could no longer read or write in English. He could still speak to his siblings in Hindi fluently but struggled to speak to his grandchildren in English.

A speech-language pathologist was the first specialist I watched interact with my grandfather in the hospital post-stroke. I was amazed at this cognitive phenomenon. I was fascinated by the presence of his language structure and lack thereof; why did his brain injury only affect his ability to remember his second acquired language, but it did not affect his native language at all?

And so, the elusive mystery of bilingual aphasia piqued my interest, and I immediately knew I had found my calling. I tapped into communication sciences and disorder to learn about how the brain works, compensates, and heals over time. This traumatic family event ignited the fire for my career as well as a lifelong passion for learning how to overcome our language deficits by using total communication and God’s Grace.