May 1, 2014

Good News, Bad News, Great News!

May 1, 2014

What a day this has been!  So as not to keep you in suspense, the good news was a good report from the heart doctor.  The bad news is that I seem to have lost my phone.  That has given me a splitting headache.  But back to that later.  OK, I had written about 1/2 of this blog entry and had to go back and add to the title "Great News!"  That is because the phone is found.  More on that later.  Now, maybe the headache will go away.  I hope.

I made it to the gym this morning for about 40 minutes.  It was a little later than I wanted when I got there, but I managed to get in a pretty good workout.  Once I got home and made Ron's coffee, I found that he was still sleeping soundly and that was not good.  He had overslept by about 30 minutes.  He had to hurry this morning and he doesn't do hurrying well especially in the mornings.  I told him I was just going to wait and come in after I went to the heart doctor. 

While still at the house, I watched some for the birds.  I spotted a warbler on the waterfall, but only got a blurry photo through the glass and I think it was a Nashville Warbler.  Then another time I walked into the sewing room just in time to see an oriole flying straight at the window.  He pulled up just in time to miss the window, but of course I didn't get a shot.  I am fairly sure it was a Baltimore Oriole.  Quickly I prepared treats for the orioles hoping to get him to stick around, but did not see him again before leaving for the morning appointment at the heart doctor.

Before I left, I decided to try playing the piano.  There is a story behind this.  I have a childhood friend named Becky who has just published a couple of short stories that you can find on Amazon for download to a Kindle (author Rebecca McLendon).  One is about living in her grandmother's house when she was about 3 years old and the other is about her piano playing.  After reading both of those stories in the last couple of days, I know that compared to Becky's piano talent, I am a novice, but I kept thinking about the piano.  As I walked past the piano this morning, I realized I had not played it since I had gone deaf.  It was time to try.

In a previous blog I mentioned sitting at the piano one day after getting the Cochlear Implant, going up the keys, using white keys and black keys.  When I would play middle C, the following 6 keys all sounded the same as the Middle C had sounded.  Then the next key was different, but the 6 following it all sounded the same.  I got out an old hymnal and began to play. Yikes!  It sounded like terrible noise!  I kept playing and I could begin to hear a few different notes in the upper range - not really a melody, but tones.  Then it dawned on me that since many notes sounded the same, I could not detect mistakes in my playing.  Well, that is nice.  Becky had talked about playing Rachmaninoff's "Prelude in C# Minor".  So I decided I needed to take on a classical challenge.  Now, this is all in my wildest dreams.  None of those great musical masterpieces are ever going to be played by my 10 fingers!  But as I pounded out chords going from one end of the piano keys to the other, my mind must have made up its own tune and I was amazing!  Anyone else would have run from the room to find earplugs, but my brain let me think for a few minutes that I had awesome talent.  Becky had talked about the "fire" in the music she played.  Well, there should be a hole burned in my piano keyboard.  Of course those who have heard me play probably thought the piano needed to be burned long ago, but as another friend and I discussed tonight, we play for ourselves, not for others.

The days of piano playing for me may be over.  There is no true joy in hearing what I play.  I can't tell if it is good or bad and as rusty as I am, bad would win out.  But it was a unique experience this morning as I was briefly a concert pianist.  As I told Becky in a message last night, when we get to Heaven, I want for her to play a concert for me one day, and then it dawned on me that she could do it for thousands of days and it would not even be a dent in eternity.  I am looking forward to a front row seat to some of Becky's own compositions and her playing of the famous masterpieces from the past generations.

Next was my trip to the heart specialist, Dr. Cua.  He said that the test from last week showed that I do not have the Mitral Valve Prolapse that I was told I had about 25 years ago.  There have been times I was turned down for medical insurance or paid outrageous premiums because of that diagnosis.  It do have a very slight heart murmur and a slight thickening of two heart valves, but he said it was very minor and not anything to worry about.  He said my heart is very strong and that he saw no need to worry, but would like to do the stress test as we had earlier discussed.  During the past 10 days I had experienced some episodes of a rapid heart beat, so we agreed on doing the 24 hours heart monitor next week as well as the stress test.  I asked about what heart rate I should aim for at the gym and it was much lower than I have been doing, so that was good to know.

I picked up lunch on the way to the shop and then did some end of the month work while Ron went on some jobs.  He was in and out a few times.  Once while he was in the shop for a bit, I went to the bank.  Late in the afternoon I started to check my messages on my cell phone, but could not find it.  I looked and looked in my purse, on my desk, in my car, etc. but there was no sign of it.  I tried thinking back to when I had last seen it.  In the doctor's office was my last specific recollection of seeing it.  After searching, I tried calling it, but it went right to Voice Mail.  I had it on the last time I had seen it and for it to go to Voice Mail led me to believe that it was in someone else's  possession.  I needed to report it as missing, but that meant using the shop phone which is not a good phone in the first place.  I looked up the information I would need and after struggling to hear the list of automated choices and punching the assorted numbers, I got a live person and told him I thought my phone was lost or might have been taken. 

Trying to hear him was almost a lost cause, but I had to deal with it since Ron was on a job and didn't expect to finish the job before closing time.  The poor man helping me had to repeat things over and over, but we finally agreed that he should deactivate the phone in case someone else had it.  He said if I found it to call back and they would turn it back on.  By the time I finished with him, I was on the verge of tears and had a horrible headache.  The phone is insured.  A lot of things are on my phone.  He had mentioned that he could start the process to get the phone replaced, but I wasn't really able to hear well enough to deal with that and was not ready to give up yet.

The tears were only slightly about the missing cell phone.  They were about the reality that I live with every day.  If I drop something, I don't hear it fall most times.  I can't easily deal with situations on the phone.  I can't make people understand that when I ask them to speak slowly and distinctly, it needs to be for the entire conversation, not for one sentence.  It was about having to always ask Ron to do things for me.  It was about knowing this is the way the rest of my life will be.  Having the Cochlear Implant is 100 times better than being deaf, but it will never come close to natural hearing. 

By the time I had done all those things, it was past time to lock up and go meet Ron and friends for supper.  I was still very upset.  I only ordered a small dish of mashed potatoes and ate less than half of them.  Ron had tried to call the doctor's office to see if I had left the phone there, but they were already closed by then.  After supper I went by the place where I had gotten lunch, but they didn't have the phone. 

While driving to supper I recalled that our son Stephen had put an App on my cell phone for just such events.  This app will wake the phone up if it is turned off and will send a strong ring.  It will get the GPS location of the phone.  Once I got home Ron contacted Stephen and he told Ron how to try to activate the phone.  Since I had Sprint turn it off, he had to call them and ask them to turn it back on for a few minutes while he tried the locator.  We didn't get a location in the next 5 minutes, so I suggested he go look in my car again since the app would turn the phone on even though it was currently off. I dialed the number while he went to the garage.  Sure enough, he found it, in my car, under the passenger front seat, in a far corner where it couldn't be seen.  With the boosted signal from the app, he could hear it and find it.  Praise the Lord!  Thank you Stephen for installing that app on my phone.  Ron immediately installed it on his.  Then Ron called Sprint back to tell them the phone had been found and all was well.  They tested it to be sure all systems were working.

All the time Ron had been on the phone with them earlier I was changing passwords to functions that I had on the phone: Facebook, email, etc.  We are both totally exhausted, but delighted to have the phone where it belongs and for Stephen having put that app on my phone for me.