THE RELATIONAL ASPECT

Back to the four aspects of this disease (physical, spiritual, emotional, relational). Finally we come to the impact this disease can have on one’s relationships. I’ll write generally and then talk about some specific relationships.

The thing that I have found that has the greatest impact on my relationships is the difficulty I have with communication. Initially, the weakness in my hands and arms made it difficult to type on the computer keyboard. As I use my laptop a lot both at the office and at home, this presented a big problem! But God had a solution! A good friend and colleague offered to purchase for me the best speech recognition software on the market—What a blessing! It worked so well that I was able to use my voice to do most of the things that I could do when I could type!

Then my speech began to deteriorate last year. I persevered with the speech recognition software until I was correcting more words than I was getting right—the definition of frustration! Then I had to resort to using an on-screen keyboard with a mouse (I could still move and click a normal mouse). This took a while to get used to since it was much slower having to point to and click on one letter at a time. But it was still quite effective. At this stage my speech was slow, but was still understood by most people.

Finally, I reached the point where I could no longer move the mouse quickly or accurately enough to use the on-screen keyboard. Again, a big problem! And again, God had a solution! A family member offered to pay for a device that I had seen on the internet called a head mouse. It consists of an ‘eye’ that mounts on the top of my screen and a reflective dot that attaches to a hat or pair of glasses which enables me to move the cursor by moving my head. I’m using the head mouse and on-screen keyboard right now to type this post. It works great as long as you don’t have a stiff neck!

At the moment I can still communicate with my voice, but it requires a lot of effort and at times it is hard for people to understand me. My voice is quite soft and gets tired quickly. And if there is much background noise, it is very difficult for me to be heard.
Most family, close friends and colleagues are patient enough to bear with my attempts to make myself understood, and I really appreciate their perseverance. I’ve also become very familiar with the blank stare and slight shake of the head that means they have no idea what I’ve just said and I need to repeat it. This is not to be confused with the response of some other people when they don’t understand me. The blank stare is the same, but it is accompanied by a nodding of the head meaning, “I didn’t understand, but feel bad making him repeat what he just said so I’ll pretend I did.” I know it’s often hard to understand me, and I really don’t mind repeating myself. Most of the time I’m able to get my message across eventually!