This weekends was a continuation of the eye-opening or more to the point eye-opening of leaving the doctor’s office Friday afternoon and hearing snow crunching under a foot, or the car signal making an extra noise.
If you consider yourself a parent, uncle, aunt, or been around any child and watch them drink lemon juice for the first time, or crawl up to a light switch and saw the amazement in their eyes of the flickering bulbs. That’s similar to what the last few days have been for myself. The sounds of my kids’ toys go off previously unheard, watching TV without closed captioning (this isn’t perfect as I still can’t catch everything but get the gist of things now), and best thing so far is understanding my kids.
Granted the comprehension stretches only to the broken third-person narrative English my daughter uses and we’re not discussing the ramifications of the 26th bailout of AIG or if Obama will have the United States sliding into Socialism by the next decade. Instead much more important issues like her favorite hat being in the wash or that she’s missing her rainbow Care Bear. Instead of a zombie-ish nod of faux understanding, I can actually reassure her a Coast Guard search is currently underway for her lost stuffed animal and her mom will have the pink hat with little ruffly ball and stitched flower on top will be Tide with Fresh Scent clean upon returning home for pork chops and roasted garlic mashed potatoes this evening.
Personal importance has a scale and my kids come first before overly greedy insurance companies taking risk on bad mortgages then passing the buck like a lazy employee when the gamble didn’t work out.
Speaking of insurance companies, why do you cover eye glasses, leg braces, crutches, but not hearing aids? Is there a reason why the gift of hearing is only allotted to those who can manage to pool enough money to buy these devices? Or pay for the $50,000+ cochlear implants versus a potential solution costing 10% of that amount and has a much lower maintenance fee, not to mention zero potential for deafness? Are your actuaries asleep at the fiscal wheel?
Its sad that I could have opted to have this elaborate surgery and received 100% coverage versus a piece of plastic that would restore most of hearing and paid the whole (less of course my more then generous friends across the internets and at home) way.
While I would have opted for this much earlier if cost wasn’t an issue, the point is a person with a hearing problem shouldn’t have to. My hearing issue isn’t because I sat next to a tower of speakers at an outdoor Metallica concert for the entire three hours rocking to "Trapped Under Ice", I was born this way. Insurance companies pay for the treatment of an obese smoker’s fifth heart surgery because he just couldn’t stay away from shoving 15 White Castle sliders down his gullet while chain smoking Marlboro Reds but won’t chip in for a person to be able to understand his child/grandchild’s plea to be tucked in at night with a repeat of Dora's adventure to the zoo?
Sad priorities.
Lucky for me, there’s people out there that went above and beyond friendship and now my daily life has been improved because of it. If I was the religious type I'd shout out a "bless you", but instead I'll promise a drink, a handshake, and most likely a better conversation the next time I see you.
Peace.
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