My journey with Apraxia of Speech started when I was two years old and diagnosed with Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS), but that was just the start of the journey with Apraxia of Speech. There is a whole other journey that people with Apraxia of speech are on. That journey is speech therapy that is an absolutely different beast in itself that takes over our lives since we are going to spend our childhoods in speech therapy sessions. We are usually so young when we start speech therapy that we do not have a concept of what we like or not. So speech therapy becomes a way of life for us since it’s another thing in our daily life that we have no control over since we are so young, and we barely notice why we are there yet. Like for me, in elementary school, Tuesday and Thursday were the days that I had speech therapy, that I had to learn just to accept that I had speech therapy those days. No matter how much I tried, there wasn’t a way to get out of speech therapy.

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We have so much on our plates at such a young age that we do not know any different in our society. Our childhoods are not supposed to look like this of going to endless speech therapy sessions and possibly other types of other therapies such as Occupational Therapy (OT) and Physical Therapy (PT). I went to PT only for a short time, Which I do not remember; however, for OT. I went to OT for the whole time I was in elementary school. That is a lot to deal with, including school, and we are most likely struggling simultaneously with it. I think the only reason we can deal with all of this is that we are so young when dealing with it that it is pretty much impossible for us to quit and give up on ourselves. As we age, life gets better since we will be able to talk better and have more people understand us, including our family. My family and I had to wait until I was five years old for me to be able to speak my first word, which was the word “ME.” So there were three years of me being in speech therapy where I wasn’t speaking. I’m not trying to say speech therapy is not worth the time or the money if your child doesn’t talk after putting your child in speech therapy. But there are times when progress can be slow, like unbearably slow; however, there are times when progress can be remarkable. Like a person who spent most of the school day with your child three months ago can see a difference.

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In the summer between 6th and 7th grade, I went to summer speech therapy like always when I was growing up. I went two times a week for 45 minutes for about three months. In Minnesota, summers were from early June until very early September, so my summer schedule should have been three months long. However, I had a family reunion, and I had to miss a week of summer speech because of it. Additionally, my parents were nice and allowed me to have a couple of weeks of summer without going to speech therapy, so I had less than two months of summer speech. But that didn’t stop me from making fantastic progress on my speech. The person I was referring to when I said “person” was my case manager, with whom I spent probably 80% of my day in 6th grade. When I returned to school for my 7th-grade year, she commented to my parents how well my speech had improved during the summer. She could understand me most, if not all, of the time now. That is how fast and drastic kids with Apraxia of Speech can improve their speech.

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I was super fortunate that most of my aunts and uncles are in the healthcare field. So they understood what my parents were going through and that I wouldn’t improve my speech within four months of speech therapy. They knew it would be a long road for my parents and me. They just got it somehow; it’s really hard to explain, but they just got it.

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Looking back to my childhood, I remember how speech therapy was a daunting experience for me before I realized its benefits. Fortunately, I had someone in my family who made those sessions tolerable and productive: my sister, who was only a year and a half older than me. Without her presence, I would have refused to do any activities during my therapy without her in the room with me. Sometimes, she would stand by the door with my mom. As I grew older, I became more independent and no longer needed her to attend my therapy sessions.

Nevertheless, she continued to go to speech therapy with me in the summer. There was one summer when she would drive me to my summer speech. While I was in therapy, she often went to a local coffee shop to get an iced coffee drink. Afterward, she would let me have half of it, and then we would go to Noodles and Company for lunch, where I always got Japanese Pan Noodles. We did this routine every Tuesday and Thursday during that summer. Looking back, I realize that my sister was truly there for me every step of the way, providing unwavering support throughout my journey with Apraxia of Speech.

As I said before, Apraxia of speech is the toughest in childhood because you come without one of the most critical communication tools a person could have. You are taken away from you without any fault of your own. Especially when younger and in the very early stages of development as a human, It’s a rough go. When you have a sibling in those same stages of life as you and you can lean off them like what I did with my sister, that bond turns into a super strong rock.

Schooling for me was more than a challenge, especially for English

Reading was a massive struggle until 3rd grade, when I started to read independently. It started in 2nd grade when I got one-on-one help for reading. The reading program I used in second grade was the Edmark Reading Program. I got one-on-one help from one of the special education teachers. We would go to our area (which was set up like a classroom, but technically not a classroom), and I used the Edmark Reading Program. In 3rd grade, I was in the special education reading class where they used the reading program that my school had, Systems 44, which was an online program. The reading program had modules like 1:1, 2:5, and 5:4. I used that reading program until 5th grade when I left elementary school. By the time I left elementary school, I was an okay reader for someone who struggled to read until 3rd grade. Then in middle school, they used READ 180, the next-level reading program of Systems 44. It pretty much worked the same way.

The handwriting was a massive struggle for me in school. Even carried over into my high school years, I would write letters and words too big to fit in between the lines and not enough space between letters in the word.

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Spelling was hard for me to learn. I failed every single school spelling test I ever took. Nowadays, it’s still hard; if I memorize a word enough times, I might be able to spell it correctly or misspell it by only a couple of letters so that spell check can fix it. If I come across a word I know I can’t spell remotely right, I use Google and think of a sentence that includes the word I’m trying to spell. Then I type the rest of the words in that sentence into the Google search bar to see if it auto-completes or predicts the word I’m trying to spell in the search bar. If it doesn’t complete the sentence, I press the enter key to see if Google automatically assumes that I typed in the sentence correctly, even with the word misspelled. Then, the search results would be of the sentence with the correctly spelled word.

Middle School was the best for me regarding getting support from special education and mainstream education because I had an amazing case manager from 6th to 8th grade. Looking back, she was the best case manager that I had in my schooling because she didn’t try to hold me back due to my disabilities. She fully believed in my academic abilities, which, sadly, I didn’t have in the future with my case managers in high school.

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When I entered high school, I had my IEP reevaluation, which required tests to be done. I did poorly on those tests, so my IEP team decided to put me in self-contained classes the following year. From the first day of class, I should have never been in those classes because they severely hindered my academic progress