The word for cow is cow.

It seems to be Brain Injury Summer round here....
First bink bonked her head, and now Sophie, one of bink's oldest friends--and my friend too--has had a stroke.

Luckily both injuries are relatively mild--there's absolutely no change to personality! Thankful.
But with brains, "mild" is bad enough: in both cases, it means NO READING, temporarily.

Spring 2021, L to R: me, Maura, Sophie, and bink (in sunglasses)

bink can't read much because her eyes are out of synch, and the close focus makes her nauseous--(though she's better, yay!).
Sophie can't read because she can't---her brain refuses to form meaning out of letters.
It's TEMPORARY, and it's spotty--the ability flickers off and on like a bad internet connection. Mostly, it's off.

It's so weird! Sophie's brain has the ability to read, it's just too busy building new pathways, to detour around its injuries --I picture major road works--it doesn't have the energy to process written language. She can name the letters she is seeing--she can spell words in front of her--but for the most part, they mean nothing.
Reading is NOT the brain's priority.

Sometimes, though, it's not just written language--it's spoken.
Sophie is staying in a rehab center near me for a few? weeks.
I visited her on Sunday--(a boring day for patients, with no PT, OT, language specialists)--and at one point she could not come up with a word every toddler knows.

"Oh, you know...,"  she said in frustration, "that animal that makes milk."

"Cow?" I said.

"Cow!" she said. But then a few sentences later, she couldn't pull up the word again.

Oddly, she can write! In her usual fluid handwriting.
But after a few minutes, she can't read most of what she's written.

The neurologist says bink's vision is mending as expected--slowly. She can read for longer and longer periods of time--though still measured in minutes, not hours.

Sophie's brain is expected to recover the ability to read too. Perhaps not 100 percent, but enough.
"I'm lucky, lucky, lucky," she says.

Life without reading... That scares me. There's television, music, pictures, audio books even (though that's too much language for Sophie's brain to process too, right now)...
But no books?

I AM WEARING MY BIKE HELMET.