I also benefitted a great deal from speech therapy. I think you will too Nick.

At one point my speech therapist and my neurologist both decided I was at about an "average" functioning level - but that scared me a great deal because I still felt very disabled. I think that's when they both realized that I was "higher functioning" before the injury I sustained. I didn't know how to word it before then or even that I should have - I always called myself "bright" which was what my dad always referred to me as. That's about the time I realized that they didn't know who I was before the injury and that's why practitioners have trouble recognizing a brain injury in people they don't know before the person's injury. *I* know who I was and what I expect of myself and people who knew before the injury knew what my functioning level was too - but people who didn't know me have no idea!

So, make sure you try to keep communicating with your speech therapist what issues you're having are. Even if you don't know the exact clinical words for the issues, just explain what you're having trouble with, give examples, and they should be able to figure out what they are. Like I used to say the wrong words a lot for things. I still do it, I did it last night, I called the couch a shelf, but I don't do it as much as I did before the speech therapy.

Anyway, fast forward a bit and I was showing a lot more cognitive improvement - I was clearly "above average" at this point in my recovery and my therapist started giving me tests and I was scoring below average on them which was contradictory to my apparent level of intelligence so we worked on those areas - one that comes quickly to mind is "word finding". I had a lot of trouble thinking of words to say even though I did know them! And I never had issues like that before the injury. It was weird because I still didn't even realize how poorly I was doing and I thought I would do great on the tests because that's how I was for 33 years before the injury but then when I did them I didn't do as well as I thought I would! She and I worked on that and it became easier for me to think of what words I was trying to say.

She gave me really good homework too.

When she and I was working on "word finding", she told me to do crosswords at home. I still do them and since I'm still improving I'm doing better at them than I was when I first started.

We worked on a lot of different things, but I can't remember them all right now. But I definitely think speech therapy can help you a great deal and I'm really glad you're going.