I was browsing through my camera and came across a few photos taken at the Zvrs booth at the recent Deafnation Expo. I first joined Zvrs during last year’s Expo, and this year, I ended up running the booth with the local Z team. We had fun, despite a hectic, very busy day!
After the clean up, the Z Team took a moment to pose for a picture:
After dinner, we were walking back to our cars when Mike Aubry spotted a “Z” high up on a building:
Stay tuned to www.zvrs.com and watch for the release of the upcoming Z4 software! This software can be downloaded to a Mac or PC for FREE– and you can have a three-way conversation with the Z4. Check out the new video for more information on the Z4 (with captions):
Yes, I know I’m going to regret Florida in the middle of a brutal Chicago winter and y’all can razz me about that in mid-February. But at least summer will come around again and I’ll be here:
I came across a post this morning, The Shame of Wearing Hearing Aids and it brought back memories. I was one of those kids who hid a hearing aid under long hair. It wasn’t until I was in college that I finally wore my hair up and my hearing aid perched for all to see. Kinda sad, eh? All those years spent trying to hide something that was basically a part of me– except I didn’t want any part of it.
I decided to raise my kids with a different attitude about their hearing aids. From the start, we went with brightly-colored earmolds with swirls and glitter. I even joined my daughter in getting matching glitter earmolds. I’m pretty sure I saw my audiologist hold back a gulp when I asked for the blue with glitter when she squeezed the earmold goop into my ear.
So far, no one has had the guts to tell me that I look foolish sporting glitter at my age.
Despite my years of preaching about being proud of those two pieces of technology on their ears, my kids had minds of their own– each of them have made decisions about color vs. minimal color. My 12-year-old recently decided that he had enough of the wild colors and chose clear earmolds at the last fitting. After years of wearing boring beige hearing aids, the oldest went for a slick black pair with clear earmolds. It was now my daughter’s turn for new hearing aids and we sat down to go over the colors for a new pair of hearing aids. Staring at the hearing aid website, I was floored at the color choices. When I was growing up, it was pretty much beige and black as the choices.
I was pretty sure she was going to pick out something cool.
“Look, there’s zebra and giraffe patterns!” I exclaimed. “And look at this cool blue and whoa– that purple! Oh and look–they have this cool see-through hearing aid!”
She picked beige.
Yes, boring, typical, oh-so-ordinary… beige.
“Mom, I’m going to be wearing these hearing aids for a couple of years, maybe even into adulthood,” she said. “Do you really think I want to go to prom with a giraffe pattern or purple– what if it doesn’t match my dress? Besides, I can change my earmold colors anytime I want.”
Yeah, she’s got a point there. Earmolds are $125 a pop. Hearing aids are nearly five grand.
We were standing at the edge of the pier, looking at the water that lapped over the brick wall in front of my parent’s house. The lake water was at a record high and it threatened to creep into the crawlspace if it rose any higher. Every day, Dad was climbing down the rickety crates that formed a makeshift staircase into the crawl space to check on the sump pump. Some of the neighbor’s homes had water in them. He was doing everything he could to keep the water from coming into the house.
“It’s been a shitty summer,” my Dad murmured. He gazed at the flagpole, which was surrounded by water. The brick wall around that area was nowhere to be seen.
Shitty summer.
The flooded lake. The cancer.
Dad was in the middle of his six-week regime of grueling cancer treatment: five days of radiation followed by chemotherapy inserted into his port. The rest of us stood by helpless as we watch the pounds slip away. The tumor that blocked his esophagus made it increasingly harder for him to swallow any food. By Labor Day weekend, he was sleeping all day and all night. He could no longer get any food down and was only taking tiny sips of water.
I fought back the panic all weekend. I was terrified. I didn’t want to entertain the possibility that he might not get better. So I asked him to start thinking about where he wanted to go after he got well. He looked at me with a little bit of surprise–why the hell was I talking about taking a trip when he was so sick and we didn’t even know what the prognosis was? I didn’t care if I was being a Pollyanna about the whole thing. So we talked about Yellowstone and the logistics of getting there and what to see.
By Labor Day, I tried to convince him to call the doctor and request a feeding tube. Being the strong, stubborn WWII vet that he is, he insisted that he didn’t want to bother the doctor on a holiday.
“Promise you’ll call him tomorrow?” I asked before I got in the car to head home.
“Yea, I’ll call him.”
He finally obtained the feeding tube toward the end of the week. Rather than getting better, he continued to decline as the effects of the chemo still barreled on. He still could not eat and that worried me.
“Don’t you think he would be able to eat by now if the chemo and radiation worked?” I speculated with my sister. Naturally, we feared the worse. Sixty seven pounds had melted off my Dad’s frame and he hardly moved from the living room chair.
Dad was scheduled for a PET scan last week to determine if the tumor was still growing or if it had responded to treatment.
We all held our breath.
My mother sent an email.
“Good News!!!” was in the subject line. I just looked at the subject line and started to cry.
“Just got back from the doctor,” Mom wrote. “The cancer cells are dead. He goes back for a checkup in three months. This is such great news!”
So, Dad, where did you say you wanted to travel to again?
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