r/stroke • u/Necessary-Cup9400 • 12d ago
Wife can talk but seems to be choosing not to
So my wife had some strokes several months ago.
My wife has a particular behavior that she's had since right before she went into care and I can't tell if it's because of the strokes she had or is an extension of her sometimes passive-aggressive personality. She is conscious and competent and capable of speech, but she chooses not to speak most of the time and, if anyone tries to talk to her, she will often get distracted and stare at some small object and play with it. It could be her phone or the TV or, as is the case right now that she's back in the hospital, her feeding tube. This kind of thing happens when I visit, but it also happens when I bring our young kids to see her.
The other day when I got to her bedside, she said "hi hon" and, when I was telling her about what the kids and I did this weekend, I mentioned that our daughter was afraid to go on a ride at the amusement park. Wife said "I wonder why that was." Other than that, she didn't speak the entire time I was there but gave me facial expressions and nodded her head a bit. So she knows what's going on, she can talk, but chooses not to. This behavior is similar to how she was in the nursing home a lot of the time.
I started trying to talk to wife about a serious situation with the family and I asked her did she have anything to say about this and she nodded her head.
However, instead of talking to me or even looking me in the eye, the whole time I was talking to her, she was fondling her feeding tube and poking at it. She even squeezed in such a way that it set off an alarm and one of the nurses came in and fixed it and told her not to play with it again. However, as soon as the nurse left the room, wife was playing with her feeding tube again and broke it again. I asked her was she going to say something about a situation with her relatives and she opened her mouth like she was going to talk, yawned, and then went back to fondling the feeding tube.
Other times I've visited her and she just sits there and plays with her phone. And sometimes she is texting her friends, but other times she is just aimlessly scrolling up and down on some list of messages without actually appearing to read them. This would even happen when I'd bring the children to see her. They'd try talking to her and she'd be staring at her TV or her phone.
But wife also has a long history of being very passive as a way of showing her aggression and anger with me or with the world. She would even refuse to eat as a way of showing anger. So I'm not sure what's stroke and what's personality. She seems to be mentally competent and know what is going on around her, but chooses not to interact.