If I had to pinpoint perhaps the worst years of my life with Apraxia, I'd have to say Middle School. In the midst of puberty, homework, the desire to have friends, and attending speech therapy 2 - 3 times a week; it was just pure hell. I was finally smart enough to be in 'normal' classes, but I was still not verbally intelligible enough to get out of speech therapy.
Hence, I tried to hide the whole speech therapy thing to a lot of people. Acquaintances, or those not close to me, would ask why I was always pulled out of class, and I lied. Saying things such as, "It's a library program I'm in" or "I volunteer at the library."
I was finally integrated enough into the general education classes, that I knew the connotation of "speech therapy." I knew that their impression of "speech therapy" was the…show more content… I could afford to miss some of those classes. However, something went haywire this one afternoon and my Math teacher received the phone call to send me to the library for speech therapy.
I have never had a teacher blatantly say, "Alyson, go to speech therapy." Most of my teachers discreetly announced, "Aly, you're needed in the library." I knew exactly what that meant. It was like an unspoken code that Library = Speech Therapy.
Apparently, my Math teacher missed this memo. Aloud, in front of the whole class (including my crush sitting in front of me), my math teacher said, "Alyson, you need to go to speech therapy."
A rock settled in my stomach, and I wondered if there was a different Alyson that message was meant for. But sadly not. My crush turned his head at me bewildered. A few other students were staring, die-hard staring at me. I'll never forget walking out of my math class and kids staring at me like I was a mutant. Granted I had lied to most of them about that "library program" in the
