Phone Success

This past year my mother recieved a cochlear implant. She wasn't always deaf but in my memory there has always been some degree of hearing loss. As the years rolled along her hearing loss became deafness. When I was still in high school, she all but lost the ability to use the telephone.

I moved away in 1981 just after high school graduation and though through an invented family code, we could communicate a bit for a short while, we've never had a long telephone conversation. That is until this past weekend.

My mother had given me her phone number not long ago and I wrote it in my much abused address book. I've always had a phone number for her, but phoning a deaf woman from overseas had been problematic in the past. I have a TTD machine that we have used in the past but it is now redundant. Mom and I stick almost exclusively to e-mail and instant message conversation on MSN. I can also send short e-mails to her pager (ingenious thing) when she's not at home.

Over the weekend at some point, I realized that with the progress Mom has been making with her cochlear implant, I could probably just call her, not having to wait until she logged on to a computer for us to communicate. She phoned me on my birthday in July and since then has had a few more adjustments to the programs that help her implant to function. It seems like a simple thing, but I have never been in the habit of just phoning my mother. We have had other ways of communication and the phone with all its problems and past history of misunderstandings just wasn't used.

I dialed her phone number and she answered. We had such a nice long chewing the fat sort of phone call. It will be great when we get to the point where we can take a phone conversation for granted. Isn't technology wonderful?