Things Must Happen for a Reason

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The other day, I went to Flare’s Christmas concert at her school. Since Angel, my youngest, was sick, she stayed home with Hubby. It was strange for me to be going there by myself, without one or both of the girls with me. They are almost always with me wherever I go.

Unfortunately, the gymnasium was dark. I could barely see the chairs lined up from the lights reflecting off a HUGE Christmas tree. I thought I chose the second row. (That’s my cue to know when to stand and when to sit by observing people in front of me.) And I also thought I was close to the middle, but I wasn’t. I was on the third row, a little off from the middle. I was given a program to follow along with the concert. Again, unfortunately, it was TOO dark to read the program!! I found myself envious of the others who could read in the dim light. The students in the concert often moved around, to stand together and sing and then return to their seats…in the faint light. No one tripped or stumbled.

I felt a little better when Flare said she couldn’t read her program, either, because of the dim lighting. I knew it wasn’t just me.

CI Moment...sort of...

But before the concert started, I had a sort of a CI moment. I was overhearing snippets of a conversation taking place behind me. I heard, “…just got in last night….they are staying here….leaving on the fourth….” Which to me meant that some relative of theirs came in last night and will be staying till January 4. I felt a little guilty about it, but it wasn’t like it was supposed to be a big secret or anything and I didn't turn around to see who was talking. I just felt like I was eavesdropping (without even trying). There wasn't a lot of noise or anything, so their voices were very clear to me.

After the concert, I waited until most of the people around me exited from their seats. I walked slowly down the dark path towards the light at the end of the “tunnel” (a pathway along the edge of the gym) near the back entrance of the school. Flare needed to pick up some textbooks and told me to stay right where I was. No parents allowed by the lockers. (Her words, I’m sure. LOL.)

Then we needed to cut across the school auditorium to get to the front entrance. I stopped right before entering the auditorium to stuff the program into my purse and take out my hat and gloves. I dropped a glove and bent to pick it up. A man on the side of me watched me. I think he said something, but I just smiled and said, “I got it.” Then I put the gloves on. A child walked around me. I smiled in that “oh, what a cute kid” smile as she gazed up at me. Then Flare came up to me, realizing I wasn’t behind her anymore. “Mom, you were standing in her way. She was in a wheelchair.”

RP Moment

Wheelchair? I did not see a wheelchair. “Someone was in a wheelchair? I only saw a child walking around me." She informs me, "That was _____ in a wheelchair."

I instantly replayed what happened. Me, stuffing the program in my purse, getting out my hat and gloves, dropping my glove, putting them on…the man looking at me and the child walking around me….I was mortified. How rude did they think I was??? Did they wonder why I didn’t courteously move to let her pass? It was DARK and all I could see was a sea of faces reflected in very dim lighting offered by the EXIT sign above the doorway. That child was not a child, but a studentin a wheelchair. Keep in mind that I had no idea anyone was in front of me. That area in front of me was too dark for me. It was the doorway to the auditorium.

Then I thought some more. Had I not stopped to do the purse thing, would I have continued to walk and walk right into the girl in the wheelchair?? How would that look? Which was worse? Was this one of God’s mysterious ways of protecting us? I always think about how well-timed things seem to be, like walking round the neighborhood. Sometimes I don’t hear a car back out of the driveway. Had I have been in the path of the driveway a few seconds ahead of time, I might have been run over. I like to think of it as one of God’s many ways of sending our guardian angels to protect us, even to put a seed of thought into our minds to pause and do something.

Then Flare and I walked through snow-covered sidewalks to the bus stop. There was a special enclosed area with a bench inside for people waiting for the bus. We waited in the cold, snowy weather, a little buffered from the winter wind, but some of the frigid air stretched out and icy fingers brushed by us and blew inside the enclosed area.

I had studied the public bus route online. It was supposed to drive by every half hour. Within five minutes, the bus came and went. What? Didn't the bus driver see us inside that little enclosed bus stop area? Were we supposed to step out and stand at the curb? It didn't even stop or slow down.

I figured we'd wait another half hour and when the bus made its rounds again, we'd get out and stand by the curb.

Nope. Nothing. An hour came and went and no bus. We ended up walking, toes and fingers numbed to the bones, into the (OH-SO-WARM!!) hospital lobby and asking for a phone to call a taxi. The receptionist there immediately made a call for us after inquiring which taxi service we wanted. She must make a lot of taxi requests for other patients/visitors.

So much for that bus experience!! It was too cold now for Flare to walk the two mile trek home from school and I wanted her to try the city bus. I figured she’d be home around the same time anyway. She’s stubborn about taking the bus (just like I am, too, but I figured we’d both cure ourselves of that. Sigh. It didn’t turn out that way). It’ll be a while before spring comes and she can start biking to school again. Sigh. I am upset about how things worked out. I don’t know if the bus service just shut down at that time or what. We had been under a four-day attack by Jack Frost (with about 2-3 inches of snow the past four days at that time-each).

It must have taken me about a good hour to calm down after getting home that day. I was so frustrated about the bus situation. I really had to stop and think again. This is the way life is and it is up to me to work with the cards I’ve been dealt. I can’ go around complaining all the time or just shrug it off. That's life.

So I am just going to file it away in the filing cabinet in my memory bank, label it “An RP Day” and take out the folder to review, to objectively and retrospectively tell myself that I couldn’t change anything, but most of all, that I am NOT alone. It happens.

If It Quacks Like a Duck...

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Today was the day of my third map. Already!! So much progress, so much time. I am holding on just fine and dandy.

Dreading the word comprehension testing as I always do, I knew I just had to do what I could. (Really, no one likes to fail a test!!) First the audie put me in the sound booth (a short jail term of maybe 1/2 an hour. I can handle that...) to hear tones. High ones. Low ones. Weird ones. I had to raise my hand every time I heard a sound, no matter how soft. The soft ones are tricky for me. Do I hear it? Is that what I’m hearing or is that an echo? After that was done, I was tested on single words with a male voice recording. The man always said, “Ready” before the word. (Ready…word, ready…word.) Then, with the male voice again, I was tested on sentences.

Before the CI (cochlear implant) I had a CNT (could not test-no speech could be heard) in the implanted ear (before it was implanted), but the right ear (the hearing aid-HA-ear) test results for the word test was a paltry 6%!! After a month of activation, I got a 26%. The audie/cheerleader said that it was good for a one-month post-activation test. Patting myself on the back. From 0 to 26 in one month. Zoooming off. Whoo-hoo.

With the sentence test, before the CI, the ear had a CNT rating, but the HA ear got 46% in Sept. 06 and 32% in January 08. Now, with the implanted ear I got 79%. (0 to 79? What kind of engine is in that CI anyway? Winks.) Not bad. I was SOoooo surprised to do as well as I did. The voices are still robotic, but I’m getting more sense of it every day and with today’s new map, the robotic sounds are really tapering down. Yep, a little less “ducky.” You know that saying “if it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, then it MUST be a duck? Well, obviously, not every person I talk to are ducks. LOL

She also balanced out the electrodes. She had two electrodes go off with a beep sequentially (one after the other) and I had to tell her if they sounded the same or whether one was louder or softer. They all had to be equal-sounding. Sometimes it was hard to tell, but I did get the more obvious “higher” or “lower” beeps. I could almost picture the electrodes as a xylophone and hitting the same thingy twice. Ting, Ting. Or Ting, Tong. Nope, didn’t match.

BTW, you guys know I call the CI “Pete” or “Petey”, but Hubby says it should be “Mr. Roboto” after a song from Styx. LOL. Okay, so that can be Petey's nickname.

Instead of all the programs with ADRO with increased volume, I have:

P1-ADRO
P2-ADRO with more volume
P3-Focused Listening (Beam)
P4-Music with autosensitivity

I kind of slapped Hubby on the knee and obviously hinted around with “MP3 player for Christmas” LOL Great for listening to music. Winks. I was advised to listen to familiar songs (Hubby piped up with Christmas carols and I am thinking of my favorite songs that I know-mostly those that were popular in the 80s and some country songs, too.)

My next map is supposed to be for the 3 month mark. That is in November. The audie did say that I may call or email her with any problems and if I needed a tweak or fine-tuning, then I could come in before the 3-month appt. Let's see how much Petey and I work together by then and get a 90 0r better? Sentences are easier because they do fill in the blanks somehow and I can get them in context. Single word tests are hard for most of us. There's nothing else to work with. I might get the ending (rhyme) or the beginning of the word ("sh") or even the middle of the word (vowel) or something.

On the home front:

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Angel got to race with her peers in a Fun Run thing that a local organization set up for grade school kids. (Last week it was canceled because of the rain.) They get a free tee shirt (who cares that it had the original run date on it?) for participating in the run. Angel ran with the other 3rd grade girls. Only one girl was a classmate and one was a girl from our neighborhood that we knew. They only gave out first thru sixth places. Angel made it to the sixth place!! Yay. You go, girl!! I treated her to a shake for her accomplishment. She liked that. It was a ½ mile run, too. She said she got tired and walked a bit, but I’m still proud of her. Next year, fourth grade boys and girls race together (not separately). She’s kind of freaking out about that. Boys are fast!! Well, if she wanted to, she could work at it and be faster. I’m not going to push her, though.

The end of the week is the mid-quarter time for Flare. I have teacher conferences next Monday. (I never knew that there were conferences in high school unless there was a serious problem. I had to ask my mom about that. She said that they went to the conferences. I guess that because my parents were active in several organizations like Lion's Club, investment clubs, and stamp clubs, that I never really questioned their comings and goings.) Anyway, I am not really complaining too much about her grades so far (I check her grades online. Isn't that something? Information Age has really come so far.) :)

Angel is too young to have mid-quarter progress reports. I think they start at 5th grade at her school, but there will be a parent-teacher conference at the end of the first quarter. The graded paperwork that she brings home every week are really good, so I am not too worried about her academically. She does have some issues behavior-wise. She's very hyper and cannot sit still.

The weather here has been GREAT. Lots of SUN and cool breezes. Yesterday marked the first day of autumn. It still feels like summer. Yeah, I know. When school starts, you feel like summer is over, but technically we still have a few weeks left of summer when school starts. The calendar doesn’t lie, people. Right? LOL. Just wait till the first snow-I’ll be yelling at Jack Frost because we don’t start winter till Dec. 21. It doesn’t matter if we get Indian Summers in October. No, that doesn’t count….

Dropping a Line

Just wanted to quick drop a line (or two or three...)....

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All Hubby had to do was walk in the house and startle me. I'd jump, I'd scream, I'd gasp and clutch my chest like I wanted to make sure I could catch my heart if it popped out, or all of the above. He would look at me and say that he doesn't mean to sneak up on me. He didn't have to try.

I could be anywhere in the house and I'd hear him. Squeak, creak. (Did I say our house is over a hundred years old? I guess I would squeak and creak, too, if I were a hundred years old.) I'd say, "I hear you." Sometimes I turn to look at him. He'd grin and shake his head and say,"I never meant to scare you before, you know." After a few more times of my turning to look at the source of the creaks, he'd continue to grin at me and say,"Now I will HAVE to sneak up on you!!" Aww, poor baby. I bet he enjoyed his ability to "not" sneak up on me and scare me at will. Now he just has to work at it. (Yeah, that means I hear the kids more, too. I am more aware of when they are coming or going, too. The "mom antenna" is more "tuned up" now....a HA!!)

I was sitting by the open window, reading (usually that will make me so engrossed in the book that I am totally unaware of what's going on around me unless I felt something vibrate, like someone "breaking some wind" on the couch. (Hubby says I wouldn't have to wait till I "felt" it; I would just have to look at the source of the sound and say, "Okay, who farted?" LOL.) I heard some kind of crunching sound outside. I look out the window and see Hubby riding Flare's bike, testing it. Her front tire was flat. She must have ran over some glass or something. The thought crossed her mind that maybe it was sabotaged, but Hubby got a new inner tire for it and said that it didn't look like it was cut or stabbed, so it must have been something she ran over. He also fixed her brakes a bit, too. Flare and I thank him for that. The brakes on her back tire will need to be replaced. Her bike is about four years old and it has had a lot of use over the last two years riding to it to school. (She carried her very heavy bike about five blocks and went to see if a friend could take her home. That was nice. Thanks again, to the friend who put her bike in the trunk and gave her a ride home.) Flare's arm is still sore from her bike-lifiting. The wheels wouldn't, well, wheel, very well being so flat.) She called home and this is what I heard:

Me: Hello?

Flare: Mom? It's Flare.

Me: Flare? Are you still at school? (I looked at my watch. It's about 4:30.)

Flare (what I could hear): ...bike...broke

Me: Your bike broke?

Flare (again, what I could hear): ...D, your interpreter...

Me, confused: Oh, it's D. I thought you were Flare.

Flare: Mom!! It's me, Flare.

Me, really confused: Flare? I thought you said you were D.

Flare: No, I'm at D's house....bike....

Me, the puzzle pieces falling into place: Oh, your bike is broke and you are at D's house. So she's going to give you a ride home?

Flare: Yes.

Me: Okay.

(Whew. Can you see how easily I can be easily confused when I was sure I was talking to one person and then I hear another name and it'd just throw me off? LOL)

I try to turn off my hearing aid at times and just see what I can hear with the CI. Voices are still very nasal-sounding, robotic. It isn't so high-pitched anymore, but it's not clear either. My hearing aid ear takes over for the phone use and speech recognition, though my audiogram says that my hearing aid ear had 32% speech recognition. But I can tell you that, at times, when the HA is blending with the CI, it "overpowers" the hearing aid ear. It picks up voices robotically and other sounds I wouldn't have picked up with the hearing aid alone. I was sitting on the loveseat in the living room and Flare was on the computer, singing. SINGING!! Did she do that all the time? Yes, she did. Whoa. I must have looked like a very calm, tuned-out Mom. LOL.

Onyx is a very noisy walker, too. I never paid attention to how much she drags her feet. I didn't even realize dogs could drag their feet. I can hear her lap up her water.

For the most part, the environmental sounds that I first heard are fading into the background (clock ticking, my breathing, even the "buzziness"). When I was outside, I thought I heard a mosquito buzz. Do they buzz? (I still don't get enough of a warning before getting bit, though. Sigh.

Since Angel's new school is on the outskirts of town now, during recess the kids come across garden snakes (garter snakes), toads, and caterpillars. Angel needed wanted a container to hold a caterpillar so she could keep one. She brought home a fuzzy brown and black caterpillar and named it "Tickles" because it tickles her as it walks across her hand with multiple sticky feet. The school yard is a nature wonderland. I hope there aren't anything dangerous lurking out there.

My next mapping is next Tuesday. Maybe this time I'll get some BEAM and/or autosensitivity programs mixed into the CI settings? These are different settings for the CI. So far all I have had to work with was ADRO with increased volume in each program. Baby steps....


A brief explanation of what these options are:

1. ADRO-for dynamic, changing environments

2. Whisper-soft and distant sounds

3. BEAM-focused listening in crowds

4. Autosensitivity-comfort in noise

Source: http://www.cochlearamericas.com/Products/22.asp

HUGS

Game Night

(I am aware that the picture didn't fit the whole frame-I cropped it before uploading it, but it ended up like this. Oh well.)

I picked up a game I thought we could play together. It's called Cranium Cadoo. A child seven and over could play it. I never played the adult version of Cranium so I didn't know what to expect. It was on sale for $7.00. What the heck? More family fun. The last game we tried, Tri Bond, Jr, was a hit. It was fun; it was similar to Blue's Clues with three clues to guess the answer.

We got the game ready. I thought it was pretty cool. You could shape something with clay (it was included) and have a player guess what you molded. Or draw a picture, act it out, or guess an answer. What fun-a bunch of different activities to do within one game.

Until...I had to read the answer with 3D glasses (see graphic above). I put the red cellophane-y glasses to my face and tried to read the "coded" answer on the bottom of the card. I couldn't read it!! I started squinting at it. I got a flash light. I aimed the light at the card. There. I did it. Then when it was my turn again and I had to read through those glasses, alas, I couldn't make out the words. :(

Needless to say, I was saddened by this step in the RP process. Red is just not a background color for me to read through. Or reading 3D concealed notes. As I mentioned before, I can read 12 point font print just fine. I read books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs without problems. Gottta think about the positives-what I can do.

Life is never boring. Always something new. Always something new to adjust to.