It was the day after the last day of second year of residency. The last 365 days had been jam packed with intense learning for Rhett. We took a long drive as a family to reconnect and give our brains a break. It soon became apparent that this brain break was much needed.

As people often do on leisurely drives, we landed on the topic of dead people. Maybe it started with a discussion of plot points in my book. Maybe we were talking about interesting careers. I vaguely remember this line of thought: Fun jobs…boring jobs…yucky jobs…surgery…cadavers…embalming…

“How does anyone decide that is their dream job?” I asked. “Working with dead bodies all the time…Is that a dream job or does it just happen because the demand is there?”

“Some people probably find it very rewarding.”

“Come again?”

I had made it this far not thinking about Rhett actually working with cadavers. I shivered.

“Maybe it’s because I have worked with cadavers,” Rhett said. “But I can see how someone would argue that it is fulfilling to perform that service for families and help them navigate through that inevitable part of life.”

“I mean think about it. Mortuists…”

“Wait.” I stopped him and smiled. “Mortuists?”

“Yeah, mortuists. The guys who work at mortuaries.”

“You mean morticians?”

He paused and thought about it before we both burst into laughter.

At two different points in our lives, Rhett and I both learned about the term “aphasia.” I was fascinated by it during my psychology minor in college, and Rhett skimmed past it in a textbook during his much-hated neurology block in medical school. Aphasia is defined as “the loss of ability to understand or express speech, caused by brain damage.”

Academic aphasia, to take it one step further, is the loss of the same speech abilities, caused by brain damage specifically incurred by extended intellectual study and deprivation of recreation and Vitamin D. In other words, Rhett had it bad.

After our extended bout of disproportionate giggles over the “mortuists” incident, we traveled home and set to researching. We now believe Rhett’s case of academic aphasia may be at the root of several other problems he has been dealing with, including:

• Inability to process my late-night monologues about the happenings of the day
• Being routinely unresponsive to calls of “Dad! Dad! Dad!”
• Answering questions that require detailed answers with inappropriate responses, such as “uh-huh,” “sure,” “makes sense”
• Saying he will be home “before dinner” when it becomes obvious later that he meant “after midnight”
• Telling our son he would take him to the pool at 6pm, when he clearly meant to say he would take him to bed

As a side note: it also can’t be a coincidence that doctors, some of the most academically drained professionals out there, have notoriously bad handwriting. One of the symptoms of aphasia is trouble writing clearly.

If you or a loved one is suffering from academic aphasia, there is hope. Understanding and diagnosis are the first steps to treatment, followed shortly by a trip to the beach without the kids.