Paul Fogle:  

1/31/2022 Hi PHS friends, In November 2021, the London, England-based Lawyer Monthly publication contacted me out of the blue and asked if I would be willing to be interviewed for a January 2022 article on speech-language pathologists as expert witnesses. I was happy to oblige. I received a scheduled call from the editor of the publication and we spoke for a while. I had already sent him an updated CV and the letter I send to attorneys who are interested in my services that explains what speech-language pathologists can contribute to either the plaintiff or defense. The editor then sent me a list of questions for me to answer for the article. I wondered how the publication chose me out of all the tens of thousands of speech pathologists around the world and was told that they have a research team that searches for people they want to write articles. Lawyer Monthly has a circulation of over 180,000 lawyers and law firms around the world, including, the UK, Europe, North and South America, Asia, Middle East, Australia, and Africa. I have received a contract from one of my publishers to write a new textbook titled "Traumatic Brain Injury in Infants, Children, and Adolescents," which will debut at the international speech-language pathology convention in Washington, DC in November 2021. (This will be my 6th textbook, plus 4 therapy manuals.) I have been working with TBIs of all ages since the 1960s when I was an emergency medical technician (EMT) in ambulances in Southern Calif., and military wounds when I served as a combat medic in Vietnam in 1969. As a speech therapist, I have specialized working with and teaching about neurological disorders in adults and children since 1971, and continue to work with clients of all ages with traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). The textbook will include chapters on all aspects of TBIs in young people, including shaken baby syndrome (about 1/3 die, 1/3 have moderate to severe problems and are in special education, and 1/3 have mild TBIs and are in regular education and on school SLPs caseloads), sports-related concussions (I was the keynote speaker and spoke on this topic at an international SLP conference in Las Vegas in 2017), and war wounds (terrorist attacks in the U.S. and other countries are always war wounds with explosions [blast injuries] or military-grade assault weapons). This is the heaviest topic any speech-language pathologist can write about, but one I have the experience and qualifications that few other SLPs might have. Besides my writing, I continue to see private clients (stroke, TBI, stuttering, etc.) each week, as well as doing medical-legal work as an expert witness (I currently have an interesting case in Anchorage, Alaska). I do make time for lots of fun activities in the Del Webb community in Elk Grove, CA where Carol and I live, including line dancing, Tai Chi, and lots of dance parties. Carol is doing great and spent the summer in Lake Tahoe working as a volunteer for Tahoe Heritage Foundation. The Forestry Service provided a full-hookup campsite for our travel trailer, so she had a great spot surrounded by forest and several other volunteers from around the U.S. I spent most weekends in Tahoe with her and was home during the week to see my clients and work on my book. All is well here and I hope the same for you. Best wishes, Paul Hi PHS Friends and all others, Updated 6/6/18 I want to tell you some things that some of you already know, but probably many don't. I have found both my birth mother and my birth father! - Or at least my daughter Heather Brooke found them for me. When I was born in August 1945, both my birth mother and father were 16 years old and going into their junior year of high school in Los Angeles. I spent the first nine months of my life in orphanages in LA before the parents who adopted me found me. As most of you know, I was raised in Acton, 14 miles south of Palmdale. My Dad was a cook and my Mom was a waitress. My Mom never finished high school and my Dad never finished 6th grade. I was the first person in my family to finish high school. When I was 8 years old my Mom told me I was adopted and she never talked about it afterward, and it didn't seem right to ask questions about it. My Mom died at age 50 when I was 18 in my freshman year at Antelope Valley JC. My Dad eventually remarried and died in his 90s. When Carol and I moved back to California in 1979, I began my search for my birth mother. I joined the ALMA (Adoptee's Liberty Movement Association) organization and had a search assistant help me in my search. I first obtained "nonidentifying information" which provided a little medical history of my mother but none on my father (although I learned that he ran track in high school, which of course I did too). I also learned that 3 days after giving birth to me, my mother had a stroke in the middle cerebral artery of her brain and that she had "aphasia" (loss of understanding and speaking), but that she eventually recovered and went back to high school. I learned that information when I was in my mid-30s, a university professor teaching neurology and specializing in aphasia and other neurological disorders. For adoptees (and I have talked to a lot of them), there are always some strange coincidences in our lives, and we cannot imagine how certain things could have happened that would tie us back to our birth parents. I searched for over 30 years for my mother and was glad I lived near Sacramento to have access to some records that I hoped would help me. It was always an emotional time for me while I was searching and I could only search for a few weeks or months at a time, and then I had to rest from it. I did everything I could to find her, including hiring people who were trained to find people, but no one could ever find her. In my mid-60s I had to finally give up and just let my birth mother and father be the mysteries of my life. Being adopted makes life a little different for a child and adult. There are questions that are never answered and there is a feeling of emptiness or incompleteness that other people probably don't feel (maybe other than young children who are orphaned). In 2015, my daughter Heather B. decided she would start searching for my birth parents through Ancestry.com. She did the DNA testing and was very diligent, persistent, and methodical in her searching - and I did not know she was doing this at all. Heather eventually told Carol what she was doing and Carol kept it a secret from me too, although she did get a DNA kit for me and had me do the testing. She didn't tell me when the results came back and that Heather was narrowing her search. In June 2016, Heather had Carol and me come down to LA and we met at a restaurant with a couple of friends of Heather's (I didn't know that the woman was a "search assistant" that Heather had been working with for months). After dinner, Heather started showing me some pictures and asked if I knew who the people were. Some of them I clearly recognized as me and others looked like me. She eventually told me that those were pictures of my father, Carlos. I was in shock. I couldn't believe that after 70 years I was finally seeing my birth father. My father did not marry my mother and he died in 2002, not ever knowing about me. Heather also showed me pictures of his other two sons - my brothers. Sadly, she said that they had both died young, one at 22 of a drug overdose and the other at 28 of AIDS. I was my father's only surviving son, and he never knew I existed. Heather told me my father had a brother, Tony, who had 4 children - my cousins. She said there was going to be a party for me at the home of one of my cousins in Torrence on Sunday, in two days. Carol, Heather and I drove to the home and the person who opened the door, Alicia, was the first blood relative - other than Heather - that I had ever seen in my life. We were very warmly welcomed by the almost 30 people in the house who had come to meet me. My 4 cousins were there and their families, and my niece from my brother who died when he was 22 was there. Jessica was just 3 years old when he died and she had driven all the way down from Washington state to meet me. Jessica had been raised mostly by my father Carlos after her father died and she was very close to my father. When Jessica and my cousins first saw me, they were shocked by how much I look like my father - and how much I talk and ever move like him. I was finally finding out where some of "me" came from. At one point in the afternoon, everyone just wanted me to talk and tell them some things about myself and my life. They were genuinely interested and accepting of me - a total stranger who is now the oldest person in the family. Heather later stood up and explained how she had found my father and how she had talked Alicia into having her DNA tested too, which confirmed everything. I learned that I am half Hispanic and that I have ancestors th...Expand for more