SSA Blog #017     By Michelle Drew     November 22, 2005

Hello Everyone - It has been a busy few days around here. We are having the interior of our house painted in preparation for its sale. We are downsizing as do many people after the kids leave home. We are stopping the work for the weekend, so we can entertain and enjoy Thanksgiving weekend. Right now it looks as if our house was stirred! Enjoy today's issue!

A Reader Speaks Out

Hello Michelle,
    Please put this story on your website. If I can help one depressed person by relating this story, it will be worthwhile.
    I was born in 1950 in the tiny community of Monette, in extreme northeast Arkansas.
    I started to school at the Arkansas School For the Blind when I was five years old. Nobody knew why I was born totally blind. I was a full term baby.
    When I was fourteen, I knew I was losing some of my hearing. The teachers' especially women, made me strain to hear them.
    When I was in the seventh grade and through high school I suffered severe childhood depression related to the grief process of losing my hearing.
    My hearing grew progressively worse and I had to piece sentences together by perhaps hearing one or two words. Losing my hearing was a grieving process.
    In 2002, I learned the cause of my blindness was Nori the disease, a disease that causes blindness, deafness, and mental retardation. I'm not retarded, but sometimes I wonder. I have a nephew with the same disease. He is blind and has a serious hearing defect.
    On August 27, 2004 I had an operation for a cochlear implant. On October 15, 2004, I was turned on to the world of sound. Waaaaaaughhh!! The cumulus cloud lifted from my head. The relief was so profound, I laughed, sang, and cried like a baby. To borrow a line from an old song: "What a difference a day makes."
    On September 26, 2005 I received my second operation for the Nucles Freedom.
    I am now happy with my two sided hearing. I can talk on the phone, enjoy music, and hear and understand my family. The depression has gone, and I'm not on psychotropic medication.     Larry Wilson

Dear Larry -

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings with this group. Sharing a joyful experience with others spreads  the joy and adds inspiration to people's days. It is important that disabled people step forward and give able-bodied people a peak into such a personal and important experience. You are a person of courage and character. Thank you again.

Michelle

All Good Thoughts

To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
Mother Teresa


You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.
Indira Gandhi


Goals are simply a way of breaking a vision into smaller, workable units.
Nido Qubein
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening,
that is translated through you into action, and because
there is only one of you in all time, this expression is
unique.
Martha Graham

This came in an internet mailing....

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