Gregory's story
Words were always the clay with which Gregory S. Schiller worked. Then, they dried up overnight.
The break began for the 66-year-old Harrisburg attorney with what seemed like a routine illness. He had a virus or a cold coming on for weeks that never seemed to arrive. One day it was bad enough that Gregory took a half day at work, went home and laid down.
He awoke to a different world. The alarm clock hadn’t roused him. The police were knocking on his door. When Gregory didn’t show up for work or answer his phone, his boss had dialed 911.
The portion of Gregory’s mind he could always rely on for his career – the part that understands and synthesizes language – wasn’t working. Words didn’t seem to make sense coming in or going out.
He could see numbers on the clock face and knew the device for measuring time, but he couldn’t read it or tell you the hour.
“My attorney skills had been kind of taken away,” he said, weeks later, after a physician-led team of physical, speech and vision therapists joined with nurses at Helen M. Simpson Rehabilitation Hospital to help him find his footing. “The reading, speaking, analyzing – I am a 30-year career attorney. This was all very strange.”
When Gregory answered his door, the police officer took him to UPMC Harrisburg Hospital where doctors discovered that overnight, as Gregory slept, he had suffered a stroke in his middle cerebral artery – one of the major channels of blood to the brain. Doctors also found that lining of his heart had become infected.
They called his sudden language difficulties aphasia. His vision was also impaired on the right side and his strength was gone.
They prescribed a six-week regimen of antibiotics for the infection, which was still causing him blinding headaches. And they also recommended Helen M. Simpson Rehabilitation Hospital.
“When rehab was explained to me, I knew I wanted to go,” he said. “It was not even a thought to not do it – I was on board.”
At Helen M. Simpson Rehabilitation Hospital, Gregory’s speech therapist tried a variety of tools, including semantic feature analysis. She would sit with Gregory and discuss the features and properties of words to help him find the term he was looking for. She also used a computer tablet with apps to help him improve his understanding of words he heard and read.
Physical therapy started slowly. Gregory tried to balance himself standing and it wasn’t easy. He was able to walk, but first he didn’t have the energy to go far. He slowly increased his distance, and worked to build both balance and strength by lifting weights on a bar while standing.
As the infection began to clear, Gregory’s strength gradually returned. The fog slowly began to lift. He credits the hard work of his therapists with much of his improvement.
“Every single person has helped me,” he said. “The most sophisticated doctors and the people making dinner. They are all fantastic. Absolutely everyone took over and rallied around me to make me better – it doesn’t matter what I was doing – they were all great.”
He began to look forward to his old loves -- traveling, the beach, playing golf, cooking and reading. Words were beginning to come easier when, after nine days at Helen M. Simpson, he was ready to go home.
“I can do just about everything,” he said. His memory isn’t quite back to what it used to be, and he’s continuing with outpatient therapy to help sweep away more of the cobwebs.
“I read and study, but it comes slowly,” he said. “I am working to relearn, retrain, unravel all these things and put them in order so they make sense.”