No, That’s Not a Bluetooth

I had an exam yesterday….one that I’ve been studying for forever. I was scheduled to take it at a specific place yesterday morning.

Let me explain that I know Murphy pretty well and he likes to show up pretty often….Murphy as in Murphy Law.

“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

It’s only a ~15 minute drive to the test center. I had planned on leaving 30 minutes prior to my appointment, but then I got a bit worried that Murphy might show up….so I decided to be on the extra safe side and leave an hour before the appointment.

Sure enough.

Traffic was backed up on the highway due to an accident then I had problems finding the center. It ended up taking 45 minutes instead of the expected 15 minutes.

I had asked in advance several times if the test administrator would be willing to write things down. I was reassured that he would. Did he? Nope. I asked but he didn’t seem to understand why. He was pretty hard to lipread too because he kept looking away from me while talking.

At that point I was just glad I had made it to the center and INSIDE the center.

Upon my arrival I discovered the building was locked and you had to use an intercom to get inside. Well erhmm…shall we say…not deaf friendly.

So I’m standing outside pushing the intercom button and hoping someone will let me in. I can hear people talking over the intercom but can’t understand what they’re saying. It took a bit before they finally let me in.

Then I found myself trying to convince the test administrator that my cochlear implant was NOT a bluetooth with someone feeding me the answers during the exam.

Oy vey. Unfortunately some kids have had their CIs stolen by people who thought they were bluetooths. CIs aren’t….exactly….the cheapest things to replace.

So all I’ve been doing for a while is studying. I decided to just take a break the night before the exam so I could go in with a fresh mind. I went over to D’s place to just chill out and forget about genetics for a couple of hours. We both sat down to watch some TV and the very first 2 sentences that came up on the captions was something like this:

“Huntington Disease can be inherited within a family and you have a 50/50 chance of having it. You can have a genetic test if you want but some people decide they don’t want to know.”

This was Scrubs.

I just stared at the screen and laughed. It seemed like every time I decided to take a break from thinking about genetics I would find something about genetics. Magazine, friends asking me about their family history, TV shows, and blogs. It is nice to see that genetics is slowly seeping into everyday life and people are becoming more and more aware of it.

The whole process of preparing for this exam did remind me of how much I enjoy genetics.

I’m rewarding myself this weekend with Jodi Picoult’s new book “Handle With Care” which happens to be about genetics too! I can’t seem to get away from genetics! 🙂

6 Months Mapping!

Geeze Whiz! 6 months since I’ve been activated?! When did that happen?!

The last 6 months has been quite a ride with its ups and downs but it’s been a good ride overall.

I do have to confess that the CI has taken kind of a back burner this past month because I have had to focus on other things. I haven’t been able to do much training with it so it’s kind of like someone pushed the pause button on my progress with the CI. I should be able to get back into the flow of things after the end of this week.

I went in for mapping and came out with 4 different programs to play with over the next few weeks. I did mention to my audiologist that I cannot hear sirens….we’ll see if one of the programs will help with that. She did give me a program that processes sounds slower which may give my slow brain more of a chance to recognize that I’m hearing something but it does affect the quality of the sound….sooo…we’ll see if I like it or not.

On a random note why would you buy your approximately 18 month child squeaky shoes?!? I walked into the building for my appointment and I kept hearing something. I thought it sounded kind of loud for the small number of people who were in the waiting room. I thought maybe it was the toddler talking/making noises but the sound didn’t match up to a voice sound. I then thought maybe it was the toy he was playing with but once again it didn’t match up. Finally my interpreter said that his shoes had some sort of squeaky things in them. Every single time that child took a step it made a noise and you know 18 month old kids just don’t sit still for very long.

The kid was behind me so I couldn’t really see what all he was doing. I slowly started to realize that I could tell when he was near me and when he was running around. I could tell when he was moving further away from me. I also caught myself turning around when he was no longer squeaking to be sure he was okay.

Maybe I should get my future kids squeaky shoes so I can keep track of them….kind of like cow bells ya know.

This was a super quick post….who knows if it made any sense whatsoever. Off to bed I go while everyone else gets up for work!

So You Think You Can Dance?!

I made a post in May about how I was surprised I hadn’t seen a deaf dancer on the So You Think You Can Dance show…..

http://kelimalia.blogspot.com/2009/05/so-you-think-you-can-dance.html

About time! I know there are tons of deaf dancers and musicians out there. I was thrilled to see this.

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/6002305/15603756

So Many Things

There’s so many things I want to do in life….I don’t even know where to start! 🙂

Maybe it’s time to make a “Life To-Do” list…..

CafePress

CafePress–how I love thee.

Updates!

My cousin who has been in the ICU for almost a week is doing MUCH better now. They’ll move him out of the ICU once a “regular room” opens up. I’m not going to go into details of what happened because there’s no reason to post it on such a public place. 🙂

I happened to run across this picture of the 2 of us when we were younger. It’s one of my all time favorite pictures. I think it’s a good example of how you can communicate through eye contact and facial expressions and still understand one another. Sometimes I think hearing people miss out on so much because they overlook that. I can have a conversation with a good deaf friend through just eye contact and subtle facial expressions. Whereas if I try the same thing with a hearing friend they just look at me funny because they’re so used to hearing words. I can say something with facial expressions/eye contact in 5 seconds that would take about 5 minutes to say in spoken language.

And yes that’s one of those old fashioned body aids I’m wearing. Apparently people didn’t realize it was a hearing aid and would ask my parents if I was listening to the radio……

As for the Lyme disease thingy. I still don’t know for 100% sure that I do NOT have it. I was supposed to find out Monday but the results weren’t in yet. All week, I’ve been playing phone tag and the “noooo don’t hang up on me!” game one has to play whenever one calls through relay. This doctor works at 3 or 4 different locations so I’ve been trying to hunt him down. I finally got someone to take a message to give to the doctor so hopefully I’ll find out soon!

No, I haven’t forgotten about the follow-up posts of my experience with music. Life has just been busy lately! 🙂

Last weekend Dennis and I participated in a 5K to raise money for low-income people who can’t afford hearing aids. We dognapped a friend’s dog who I blame us coming in dead last on.

A bunch of us went to a roller derby last weekend. It was my first time seeing a roller derby so it was interesting to see something new and different.

I’m posting the below picture for my fellow genetic buddies. This is one of the roller derby gals’ name. It says “Dominant Jean” and the number is “XX.” I love it! I’m such a genetic geek! 😀

Worst Sound Ever

I’m starting to gradually associate certain sounds with meanings and emotions instead of just representing something visual.

I think I just heard the worst sound ever today.

Let me back up a bit. A cousin of mine is in the ICU so I went up to the hospital to visit him this afternoon. I spent a couple of hours in the waiting in the ICU room; there was another family there.

This family had about 40 members present and I learned their story quickly. Apparently a young lady was shot. I happened to be in the waiting room when someone told me they overheard that this lady had just been declared brain dead.

A couple of minutes later her mother walked in sobbing. I was wearing my CI at that time and had my back to her. I couldn’t see her but could hear her. I had to really choke back the tears. I came pretty close to just turning my CI off.

A mother grieving over the loss of her child. Worst. Sound. Ever.

In the mean time I’m really hoping things turn out okay for my cousin.

Sixty-Five Roses

I was looking up something about cystic fibrosis for genetic counseling and ran across this. It made me smile.

“Did You know?

Cystic fibrosis is sometimes called “65 roses.” The nickname came from a little boy who overheard his mom talking about the condition on the phone. He thought that each time his mom said “cystic fibrosis,” she was talking about 65 roses.”

200 Posts!

I was getting ready to blog about the South Africa track star, Caster Semenya, then realized I’ve reached the 200 blog posts milestone!

This deserves a post all of its own especially considering I didn’t think this blog would even last more than 2 months.

Hopefully I’ll get around to blogging about Caster tomorrow. I’m especially interested in the genetics aspect. Should she be allowed to race with females? Should athletes be required to take genetic tests to determinate their gender? How is gender defined?

What’s the Most Frustrating Thing About Being Deaf?

What’s the most frustrating thing about being deaf?

People ask me this from time to time. I usually have to stop and think. I tend to say something along the lines of communication barriers and feeling left out. That’s the easy and quick answer.

When actually, I think the MOST frustrating things are:
1) Ignorant people
2) People who don’t seem to have any common sense
3) People who feel sorry for me

This is when we have to:
-be patient
-be willing to educate others
-be willing to meet people halfway