One of my favorite parts of interacting with so many different people who are diagnosed with acoustic neuromas is seeing commonalities that we share.  Sometimes, these shared experiences are very expected and obvious. Other times, the similarities are more surprising.

I have recently embarked on recording a podcast where I chat with people who have been diagnosed with acoustic neuromas. As we have been working on recording these episodes and doing all the backstage production work like captioning, a distinct theme has arisen. Wordfinding issues are a common acoustic neuroma experience.

In case wordfinding isn’t in your lexicon, that is a term for the process of selecting the word you want to say. You are struggling with wordfinding when you say, “It’s just on the tip on my tongue!” Sometimes people will substitute a replacement noun like, “thing,” to help them when wordfinding is hard.

When I see people with acoustic neuromas struggle with wordfinding, I feel that it is most often expressed by a small pause as they need just a little extra processing time to pull the word from their brain to their mouth. I know that I personally use synonyms a ton because I often can’t quite locate the word I intend, so I tend to grab the most accessible word that I can locate. This cover method, while very useful, doesn’t help much when it comes to proper nouns.

When I first noticed that wordfinding was a struggle commonly seen for folks with acoustic neuromas, I did a little looking into the reason why. The first explanation I found made so much sense to me. Essentially, we can struggle with wordfinding because we have less bandwidth for picking out what we are going to say because we use so much more energy on hearing. In general, in a conversation you are both listening to the person talking and cueing up what you will say next. With the strain hearing loss brings to understanding communication, it can leave insufficient energy resources for preloading the words you will say. Add in the fact that people with acoustic neuromas are also working harder on other neurological tasks like balance as well hearing, and it sure makes sense that we may occasionally need some “buffering” time to find our words.

I also found there is a more directly physical reason for the wordfinding issues. It seems that brain stem compression can directly impact language processing. Because the brain stem acts as a relay center, if the tumor presses on the brain stem it can create delays in wordfinding. Brainstem compression doesn’t occur with every acoustic neuroma, but it isn’t uncommon with larger tumors.

I think that for most people with acoustic neuromas, the wordfinding struggles are fairly mild. While it may be annoying from time to time, for the most part, we can easily communicate what we need to and our conversational partners don’t mind.

If you feel your wordfinding issues are more impactful, speech therapy is an option to get assitance to help with improving this issue. I also think that looking into hearing devices may help a little with wordfinding as it may reduce cognitive fatigue and hearing strain by making listening more accessible.

Hopefully, the next time you can’t find the word you want to say, you can give yourself some grace knowing that you aren’t alone and this is a common experience.  We all struggle with finding words from time to time, especially when tired or in environments when it is difficult to hear.