Getting word count of doc/docx files in R

I have a stream of doc/docx documents that I need to get the word count of.

The procedure so far is to manually open the document and write down the word count offered by MS Word itself, and I am trying to automate it using R.

This is what I tried:

library(textreadr)
library(stringr)
myDocx = read_docx(myDocxFile)
docText = str_c(myDocx , collapse = "")
wordCount = str_count(test, "\\s+") + 1

Unfortunately, wordCount is NOT what MS Word suggests.

For example, I noticed that MS Word counts the numbers in numbered lists, whereas textreadr does not even import them.

Is there a workaround? I don't mind trying something in Python, too, although I'm less experienced there.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.