The speech and language counselor has made it her life’s mission to increase awareness and give a voice to those who have lost their ability to talk after seeing its terrible and distancing effects.
Khoo is particularly alarmed by the” common misconception that those with dementia are stupid.”
” People often equate competency with intelligence, we think that somebody who’s brilliant is very knowledgeable. However, an aphasiac man may know far more than they may show. They possess a lot of information in their heads, she explained, but they struggle to communicate it.
Khoo uses an analogy to illustrate the disappointment experienced by aphasia:” Imagine you are instantly teleported to Poland if you don’t speak or understand Polish. You’re handed a restaurant that has no pictures, just foreign phrases, and the server comes up to you speaking in Polish. How would you think? How would you like to receive your meals?
For someone with dementia, this is not an isolated, once-off affair. ” It’s their daily existence”, she said.  ,
AN Attention IN COMMUNICATION LED TO A LIFE-CHANGING CAREER
Khoo had always been fascinated by language and communication. Khoo looked for a job after earning her degree in conversation research, finally landing a position in marketing for a business that works with dyslexia-afflicted children. She first became interested in talk therapy at that time.
She had an eye-opening second encounter with a speech therapist working in a public clinics. The speech therapist was assisting an ear, nose and throat specialist with a required, a procedure that allows the tongue (voice field ), vocal ropes, and again of the mouth to be examined.
” I think I nearly fainted ( at the sight )”, she said. But it altered the way I saw the field because it could be” soft” but also so medical and scientific. That definitely piqued my interest”.