As head of the Deschutes County Community Development Department, George Read delivered one of Oregon’s fastest-growing counties from the doldrums of the 1980s into a stretch of blistering growth.

Today, the 52-year-old estimates he has lost two-thirds of his vocabulary and the skills necessary to articulate a lifetime of knowledge and experience.

Read, who recently retired after a 23-year career with Deschutes County, is recovering from a stroke.

”In some ways I don’t know anything, and on the other hand, I still know everything,” Read said.

About 700,000 Americans have a stroke each year, according to the American Stroke Association. It is the nation’s third-leading cause of death and a major cause of long-term disability.

Strokes occur when a blood vessel carrying oxygen to the brain is either blocked or bursts, causing injury to the brain.

As a result, stroke victims can face serious disabilities involving motor and speech functions. For some, that means therapy is needed to help recover the ability to do basic day-to-day tasks like driving or reading.

Read’s journey – which took him from a 10-year stretch of work with nary a sick day to early retirement last month – began March 29, 2004. That’s when chest pains progressed to a blood test, which led to emergency heart bypass surgery.

Four days later, as he prepared to leave St. Charles Medical Center-Bend, he collapsed.

”In the morning I was supposed to go home and I just fell over,” Read said.

Read had experienced what is called a middle cerebral artery stroke, an injury that affected his language skills.

He remembers the moment of his injury vividly. He could understand what he was saying to doctors treating him, but it came out as gibberish to them, Read said.

Kim Read, George’s wife, rushed to the hospital after getting the early morning phone call. She could see that her husband knew something was wrong, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying.

”It was unintelligible. It was garbled and you could see the questioning in his eyes,” Kim, 48, said.

It helped that Read had his stroke in the hospital, where he had immediate access to treatment.

Doctors were able to insert a device through a leg artery that helped treat his brain injury, Kim said.

Within 12 hours of the stroke, he was moving his right side, which had been temporarily paralyzed, Kim Read said.

COMEBACK

Read arrived at his first rehabilitation appointment on April 7 in a wheelchair. He soon progressed to a walker and then to a cane.

Today he has regained his driver’s license. He reads with the help of special computer software that highlights and says words out loud at the same time he’s reading them.

He runs several miles in his west side neighborhood every other day. Kim estimates he’s lost 25 pounds of fat and regained 15 pounds of muscle.

He goes to speech therapy sessions three times per week and spends hours ”reading” with the help of his computer software.

”George is probably the most motivated patient I’ve had in my career,” said Elisa Jadzak, a speech and language pathologist at St. Charles-Medical Center-Bend. She’s worked with Read since June. ”You give him a suggestion and he just goes for it.”

As part of his therapy, Read still drops by work in his corner office at the Deschutes County Community Development Department three mornings per week.

Staffers continue to rely on Read’s encyclopedic knowledge of Oregon’s often arcane land-use planning system, said Tom Anderson, who replaced Read as director of the Community Development Department.

”He’s like a library. He’s real good on anything that happened before the stroke,” Anderson said.

Particularly to someone who has never met him, Read’s medical condition can be virtually unnoticeable. But occasionally he stumbles in conversation – such as when he recently tried to recall when he became director of the county’s planning department.

”Numbers are so strange,” Read said, grabbing a yellow pad of paper and writing the numbers ”89” with a pencil. ”That’s when I became the planning department director.”

On a recent afternoon, Read sat in his office and held forth on a variety of planning issues, from destination resorts to the preservation of views along county highways to the recent passage of Measure 37, a property rights law passed by voters in November.

Although Read’s long-term memory is completely intact, it was a conversation that surprised him. Often Read knows what he wants to say, but he has trouble finding the words.

”When he got home he goes ‘My office is a magical place,’ ” Kim said. ”That’s where the automatic stuff comes back because he knows it so well.”

NOT THE SAME

George and Kim Read were married by Presiding Deschutes County Circuit Court Judge Michael Sullivan on Dec. 13, 2004 at the Deschutes County Courthouse.

”We just decided to do it and we did it,” George said, sitting in the living room of the couple’s west side home on a recent afternoon.

It was more of a formality, really. The couple had been together since their first date, when George asked Kim out dancing on Valentine’s Day in 1997.

They had much in common: Both were single parents, had similar political views and they lived in the same neighborhood at the foot of Awbrey Butte.

”I used to see him chasing his dog around the neighborhood,” Kim said.

The proposal surprised Kim, who works in the office of a rain gutter manufacturer in Bend. But considering the trials of the last 10 months, saying ”yes” wasn’t a really a challenging decision, she said.

”That’s the thing – life is short,” Kim said.

Life is different since George’s stroke too.

Finances are tight. George said his goal is to go back to work but it’s unclear when or if that will happen.

Communicating can be a challenge. People recovering from strokes have trouble understanding and producing language.

George suffers from apraxia and aphasia – common speech disorders that often result from stokes.

Even when a connection is made George sometimes doesn’t know it, Kim said.

”He questions whether he understands things correctly or he hears things differently,” Kim Read said. ”Many times he’ll miss the nuances.”

People talking with stroke patients should consider being patient while waiting for a response to a question, said Jadzak, George’s speech therapist. In addition, speaking slower is also a way to get through.

”By the time you’re finished talking to him he’s probably only heard the first third of what you’ve said,” Kim said.

Short-term memory is an issue, particularly in the midst of a conversation.

”His memory is not good,” Jadzak said. ”It’s because he’s struggling so much to comprehend he can’t remember.”

It’s a frustrating condition, particularly for someone whose job has focused on communication – with developers, with the public, and with elected officials – for the last two decades.

”It’s sort of like the old saying, ‘What if the tree fell over would you know if you hadn’t heard it?’ ” George said. ”If I can’t explain it, how would you know if I knew it?”

Those who knew him before the stroke recognize their friend. But there are noticeable differences.

”I believe that inside his brain he’s the same George that was always there,” said Anderson, who succeeded Read as head of the community development department. ”But it’s just the language barrier – both in terms of being able to speak and to understand what’s been spoken to him.”

Sometimes communication breakdowns cause the Reads’ relationship to flare.

”We get upset with each other and a lot of it is misunderstanding or miscommunication,” Kim said. ”One thing George has lost is his tact. It’s not on purpose, it’s almost like a child who’s brutally honest.”

A few months after the stroke, the couple traveled to a weekend ”stroke camp” to better understand George’s condition.

Stroke victims of all ages, suffering from varying degrees of disability, were separated into one group and caregivers into another, Kim said. It helped to know others were going through the same experience, she added.

Some seemed to have no will to fight, Kim said. Depression is a well-known and debilitating side effect of strokes.

”I’ve never stopped loving him, I admire his strength,” she said, of her husband. ”At stroke camp I saw men who had given up.”

Chris Barker can be reached at 541-617-7829 or at cbarker@bendbulletin.com.

aphasia and apraxia

Aphasia is a total or partial loss of the ability to use words, most often caused by a stroke that injures the brain’s language center. Some people with aphasia recover quickly and completely after a stroke. Others may have permanent speech and language problems.

Apraxia is a speech disorder in which a person has trouble saying what he or she wants to say correctly and consistently.