We further adapted our rehabilitation strategies to make up for what we lost without the bedrock of speech therapy and Brain Training. Generously, Kathy stepped in to work privately with Matt via hour-long Zoom meetings twice a week, a personalized program she called Educational Tutoring. Together, we identified achievable goals and action plans. She centered her efforts mostly on language mechanics, choosing Harry Potter because she knew Matt already loved the story. "He could figure out the gist of the paragraph when reading silently," she later commented, but "I wasn’t sure how well he was actually reading, because he knew the story too well. So we switched to reading out loud." That shift revealed the true depth of his struggle; he read aloud at a snail's pace and made frequent mistakes. At times he wanted to quit, but under her guidance, they went on. In these sessions, Matt practiced vocal clarity, comprehension, composing his thoughts, summarizing discussions, and writing assignment checklists. My priorities leaned heavily toward real-world, higher-level applications to help Matt read and comprehend specialized literature, while targeting his reasoning and problem-solving skills. Between the two of us, there was certainly no shortage of deficits to address.

Sounding out words remained a persistent challenge for Matt. To address this, Kathy helped him break multi-syllable words down into smaller, manageable components. She directed him to temporarily disregard suffixes like “-ing” or “-ed” and concentrate entirely on getting the root word accurate before rebuilding the full word. This decoding work was further complicated because Matt intermittently swapped letters within a word, such as saying “k” instead of “g” in “thing.” Once his brain locked onto an incorrect substitution, it was difficult for him to move past the error and identify the proper sounds. Under her patient tutelage, however, Matt steadily learned these methods for tackling challenging vocabulary. In another targeted exercise, she would read strings of four to five words from the novel that Matt had to hold in his mind and either repeat back or write down, pushing his short-term retention.

Kathy noted that he was like a sponge, absorbing and applying everything he remembered. After their initial five sessions, she reported noticeable advancements in his reading inflection, content retention, and his emerging ability to independently compose and express answers. Once, listening from another room, I concurred that as he read, he spoke clearly and loudly enough to be understood—a marked contrast to his previous quiet, disjointed delivery.

On the home front, I often had to gently coerce Matt to participate when the task-benefit correlation wasn’t clear to him. The drills were exacting, and the repetitive drudgery wasn’t fun for either of us. Mindful of the old proverb that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," I intentionally offered variety and limited the activities he liked the least. Every day, Matt read a page or more aloud from his current novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Over the course of the year, Matt relied less on guessing at words and became more adept at systematically sounding them out the first time. Despite his initial reluctance, it was encouraging to hear him make an effort.

Equally beneficial, his self-monitoring skills were improving. Now, when he misread a word and realized the sentence no longer made sense, he more often stopped to correct it rather than plow past it. While he got stuck less frequently, the tendency for his mind to fixate on a mistake remained, like a stubborn weed that was difficult to pull up. During one session, the culprit was the word insertion. He started out by saying, "Interesting." Even after he managed to decode the base word correctly, he gave in to guessing random suffixes willy-nilly, including "inserting," "inserted," and finally "insertion." Resolving that single word required a full minute of patient waiting and multiple cues from me.

Developing that computer savvy also required addressing his physical typing mechanics. Eighteen months after his injury, Matt began an online typing program, starting with the home row letters before moving on to the keys above and below. While his left hand typed somewhat automatically, his right hand struggled to find its targets. The program required him to recognize random letters on the screen and translate that visual information into the corresponding hand and fingers. It was exhausting; he frequently confused letters, substituting a t for an f or an a for an s.

The period and comma keys, both on the bottom row under the strict jurisdiction of his right fourth and fifth fingers, were tricky, to say the least. Oddly, Matt was far more accurate when copying directly from a printed text document than when practicing with random arrays or typing directly from his own thoughts. At the start, he clocked seven to eight words per minute. Over the span of eight months, he accelerated to fourteen words per minute, his hand positioning and technique refined, and he relied less on looking down at the keyboard. Best of all, his timed tests were frequently punctuated by a triumphant, "Booyah, baby!" whenever he did well.

By the end of summer, Matt’s steady growth meant that our initial action plans had already served their purpose. We shifted our attention to less-developed areas: symbol recognition (letters and numbers), processing to break words into syllables, and fine motor skills for typing and music. In addition, we targeted memory retrieval, the ability to compose and express thoughts readily, and conversational clarity every day.

In October, Kathy and Matt began transitioning from handwriting to typing. She initially tried dictating a brief sentence, but it proved too difficult; by the time Matt typed the first word, he could not retain the rest of the sentence. The sheer mental effort of hunting for keys on the keyboard completely depleted his working memory, leaving no cognitive bandwidth to hold onto the remaining words. Adapting quickly, they switched to a one-word-at-a-time approach. Kathy would say the word, Matt would repeat it, and then he would say each letter aloud as he went along. She recognized that Matt’s compensatory strategy of spelling words out slowed him down and needed to be integrated. Hearing this, I jokingly suggested that we might need to tape his mouth shut.

Ultimately, three practical factors advanced his typing proficiency. The first was his renewed enthusiasm and ability to use his laptop. Operating the computer did not happen automatically; time and again, he had to relearn how to navigate basic programs like Word, including where to find various buttons, tabs, and functions. Searching the internet, however, was much more intuitive—perhaps because it opened up an exciting world and gave him a sense of independence and escape that he didn’t have in his everyday life.

Second was Matt’s eagerness to add recipes to Evernote, his digital filing system. At first, I didn’t think this was the best use of his time until I witnessed the positive impact on his typing. By then, he had lost interest in the formal typing program, and this endeavor proved to be an excellent substitute. Matt painstakingly typed recipes from online sources or from my cookbooks into the app. He transcribed an estimated twenty-five to thirty recipes before I finally let the cat out of the bag—there was an easier way: simply upload a picture of the recipe directly to Evernote. Oh well, it was good practice while it lasted.

Finally, creating PowerPoint slides for his engineering lectures kept him highly engaged and typing; he could see a direct correlation between this activity and his goal of becoming a professor again. When all was said and done, while Matt was not super-fast, his typing was functional and would likely continue to sharpen with time and use. Best of all, we no longer had to convince him that typing was an important skill to master—he was already fully vested in the process.

In November 2020, after a three-month hiatus, Jessica and I persuaded Matt to resume formal speech therapy. The goal tied directly to his career aspirations: improving his ability to involve students during lectures, enhancing his overall voice quality, and minimizing slurred speech. To achieve this, Jessica coached him on the mechanics of polished public communication—the very elements that make a crowd want to listen. She pushed him to project his voice to the back of an imaginary room, hold eye contact, and incorporate natural intonation and gestures. Jessica also targeted everyday conversational speech, challenging Matt to initiate conversations and keep them moving by asking relevant follow-up questions or responding dynamically to another person’s comments. Afterward, he was asked to critique his own performance to build self-awareness.

The cumulative effect of our many targeted interventions led to visible changes in his overall processing capacity. By this point, both his auditory and working memories were noticeably better, giving him a much sturdier foundation for handling conversations and daily tasks. Kathy's feedback provided an incredible benchmark for this growth; she reported that his long-term memory was "greatly lengthened," allowing him to hold onto and recall complex structures far better than before. It was deeply encouraging to realize that even at the two-and-a-quarter-year mark, Matt’s momentum wasn't plateauing—he simply continued to flourish. We praised God for His continued and abundant blessings. 

© 2026, Sarah Watkins