Well, I am back to being a housewife. My ex-husband can tell you that I do NOT make a very good housewife. There are only so many times that I can sweep the floor, vacuum, do dishes, do laundry, make a menu and go shopping, not to mention all of the other fun stuff that comes with housekeeping before I absolutely lose my mind. I don’t have kids, unless you count fur babies, which so many people don’t, and I don’t have very many hobbies that I really enjoy or find passion in. I especially don’t have many hobbies that don’t require the ability to use my hands and/or to drive. Not working a job, bringing in my own money to contribute to the household, and sitting at home playing video games actually really bothers me. 

I have a lot of respect for women who are Housewives or men who are Househusbands who find meaningful ways to contribute to their households. It  takes a special kind of person and I am just not that person. 

When I was a housewife in Guam, I got around it by going back to school. I had started writing a novel and decided I wanted to be a writer so I went to online courses and got my first degree, a Bachelor’s of the Arts in creative writing. Then I changed my mind about what I wanted to do and I started on my second degree, my first Masters,  in psychology. I finished that degree after moving back to Alaska but it was going back to school that kept me sane and feeling like I was contributing as a house wife then. 

I don’t have the luxury of doing that now.

Part of the reason that I started the blog was so that I’d have something to do that wasn’t playing video games, cleaning, or sitting around scratching my head wondering what next. But now that I’m starting to have symptoms coming back worse than before,  it’s a little harder to type, and to think while typing. If things keep up on their current trend it is possible that I could lose the ability to type all together and then what? Fortunately, we live in an age of technology.

Isn’t that great?!

It means that even if I do lose my ability to type I won’t lose my ability to keep writing this blog. 

I’m currently using Google Docs’s ability to turn speech into text for free. It’s working alright, although editing is a bit of a pain. I’m still having to learn some of the commands and figuring out my cadences, volume, and how to edit without the keyboard is a challenge. I do, however, enjoy the fact that there is free technology out there that can be utilized for people who are just trying to get a feel for things or for people who need these support but don’t have the funds to get it.

At this exact moment speech to text is not necessary, rather something I’m doing to practice and so when I get frustrated with speech to text or find large blatant errors that I can’t fix with just speech to text, I can fix it with the mouse and keyboard just fine.

There have been, however, a couple of times this last week where I wanted to type and I couldn’t physically do so. Almost pure speech to text would have been necessary then. On those days I just spent a lot of time in bed listening to Audible and scrolling through my phone because I didn’t practice speech to text before that and didn’t have a lot of energy to do much else. In order to get around that for the future, on days like today where I still have the ability to type and edit, I am practicing so that on days where I want to write but physically cannot I still have this tool to fall back on.

I remember when Dragon Dictation was first coming out and how revolutionary it was as an assisted device to help kids with dyslexia, dysgraphia, or other disabilities that made typing essays hard. I’ve looked into using Dragon Dictation but it is expensive. I just don’t have the funds at this current moment to make that happen, but as time goes on it may become more necessary to find those funds and find a professional grade tool to help me keep writing. 

While speech-to-text in Google Docs is wonderful, there are other places that I need to be able to type and some of those don’t have speech-to-text abilities in their programming already. There is always the ability to write in Google Docs then copy and paste but again that requires some level of fine motor control or ability to type and use the mouse and keyboard. Its what I am doing today for this post, (dictating in google docs then transferring to wordpress), but I wont always be able to do this.  

When I first got sick before they realized what was wrong, the third or fourth thing for me that was a really big  symptom letting me know something was seriously wrong was the fact that I lost my ability to type. Before I got sick I was typing  about 90 words per minute with 90% accuracy. When I tested at the rehabilitation center in January I was down to about 50  or 60 words a minute with 80% accuracy. 

Writing IEPs and progress notes before my hospitalization was a pain and took forever!

 One of the things we noticed in Saint Elias Rehabilitation Center was that when things are going hooey in my brain and I still try to type, my hands tends to drift to the right unconsciously and then I lose my place on the keyboard and have to spend a lot of time looking down at my fingers which tanks my accuracy. Speech-to-text was suggested by my physical and occupational therapists as a tool to help me keep writing. I didn’t really use it though, because at the time I had recovered a lot of skills and things were on the rise.

Since September when I tried to go back to work (and failed) and since my pseudoseizers started up again really badly, typing is starting to go, my rightward drift is starting to come back, and accuracy is starting to decrease making writing very frustrating. When my brain is already fuzzy and my head is already feeling like it’s going to fall off, and my body is already feeling like something is wrong and not communicating with my brain correctly, the last thing I want to do is fight to engage in my hobbies and the things I find joy in. It just frustrates me more and depresses me because it reminds me very blatantly how bad things are getting again. It also scares the crud out of me but I wont dig into that much.

Really it comes down to this- when I cant’ keep my hands on the keyboard without staring at them it’s a bummer and I loose interest in writing and that has happened more than twice in the last two weeks.

As a result, I must admit that I should listen to my occupational therapist and physical therapists and start finding tools to help me work around things and keep my few hobbies I have. 

Yay for speech to text. Thank you Google Docs for having this as part of your programing for free. Yay for work arounds for the disabled that allow them to keep their voice and share their stories!

Technology is great!