William fessed up to me about deleting the e-mail. I went through my lecture series about me and his father being entitled to the same privacy that he is entitled to. (He goes into a minor catfit if one of us even goes into his bedroom!!) I am not going to give him a cent for anything this week beyond his basic needs!!
Bill is twenty two years old and that is old enough to hold down a job, pay most of his own bills, and assume some responsibility for himself!! When I was twenty two years old, I was teaching school full time, working in a nursing home part time, had bought my own car, and was busily trying to help my mother pay her bills!! He is going to have to learn how to support himself..no matter how many times we have to get him started..over and over..and over,..and over!!
I can do nothing with the book company until Rosezelle gets back from Kentucky!! Daryl is really excited over the possibilities of what the Nellie book could accomplish as far as human rights for the disabled, but I can tell him right now...Nellie became famous years ago. She was an interesting news item and then, she was forgotten.
Our blind pastor should feel that we,..three,..are very lucky that the book is attracting as much attention as it is right now!! It is very nice to think that we are going on our third edition of the book!!
I talked about my disabilities in my Abby Normal Psychology class. The same old questions arose, "How can you learn if you have a very poor memory of what has just happened to you? If you cannot even distinguish written symbols against a certain background..how can you write or type on a computer? Are you lipreading me? How skilled are you at lipreading? Do you use the residual sound that you can pick up or do you hear anything at all? How can you remember the portions of conversations that you do understand? How do you even learn at all? My little brother is totally deaf,..he can't speak at all,..why is your speech so clear?" Lordy,..if I could answer all of those questions,..I would be a college professor and not a student,..writing here this morning on this blog!! I can learn because I have learned to learn in a different way...i...e..I repeat things and go over them and over them and over them and work like hell to comment them to memory...if those things involve sound. I am fairly quick to pick up certain things..if they are in print!!
I should probably use a hearing aide more than I do, but the dang things make my ears swell up so much and hurt in my ear canals so much that I would rather undergo the inconveniences of not using one!!
I am also a terrible faker. I learned long ago the hazards of being "totally honest" with a vocational rehab person of any kind!! Those folks are more interested in spending as little money as possible on a person's disability than they are in actually helping one to deal with the disability itself. At least,..in Canton, Ohio..that's what they are!!
My last BVR councilor was willing to spend over three thousand dollars so that he would have an evaluation that he could use to "prove" that I was untrainable...rather than spend $1500 to give me the training that I could have used to have gotten a job or improve my nursing skills to the point that I would not come back to his office anymore!!
I long ago learned the value of the "nod and grin."
"Do you really understand everything that is being said?" asks the BVR councilor. I just nod and grin and try to get to the parts that I can put together. I really don't miss that much!
Using both sound and lipreading,..I supposed I get about eighty or ninety per cent accuracy. Then,..there is the classic, "How can you be a practical nurse if you can't hear that well? How can you be an effective nurse if you forget things?"
In homecare nursing,..almost everything and all nursing instructions are totally written out. Most of the nursing techniques that I must use on a client are demonstrated five or six times even for a new person on the job with no disabilities so that that person will feel confident of what they are doing with the client. In home nursing,..there are no beepers to listen to,..no buzzers to answer and no blinking lights to distract. In homecare, I am one on one with the client and I can observe in detail..everything about that person's physical condition and call for help in an instant if help is needed. It does not take hearing to clean up vomit,..change a poopy diaper,..give a person a bath, or observe changes in a person's physical condition!!
I wish that in Ohio that people would be taken on their individual needs and not "according to distinct diagnosis!" At the same time that a person at Edwin Shaw Hospital was telling me that "I could not possibly be doing all of the things that I had honestly told him that I was doing,".....At the time,..I was finishing up writing WALKING FREE; THE NELLIE ZIMMERMAN STORY and getting it ready for publication, finishing up a six year term oh the Ohio Governor's Council on People with Disabilities, serving on my local Citizen's Advocacy Committee for Ohio Rehab,..working a forty hour a week job with a girl, who was dying of muscular dystrophy, and taking care of my mother-in-law, who was dying of kidney failure and congestive heart failure!! I have also had to deal with my husband's chronic depression and make him stay on his anti-anxiety meds so that he can remain functional!!
I was doing all of this while a person, who was sitting in an office and not paying anything to what I was doing in my real life,..told me.."You cannot possibly be doing all of the things that you told me you are doing because my diagnosis of you says that you cannot be doing those things according to the criterion of the diagnosis that this hospital has set up!"
Well, FUCK the diagnosis! My family has to keep on going and so do I.
And people like that are what makes me so leary of so-called professionals, who will spend thousands ot dollars so that they can avoid a person's real needs and protect their pensions and salaries and perks! I have been fairly fluent in American Sign Language for over thirty years, and I had a "rehab counsilor" tell me "You are just imagining..that you can sign!!"
I wrote a book with the help of a woman who is almost totally deaf and her husband has been totally deaf all of his life, and if that is not American Sign Language that we have been using for the past five years to communicate with each other to get that book written,...then,..I better go back for another look! The rehab councilor will not read the book and this is a direct quote, "I am not a reader and it is certainly not worth my time!!"
The three of us, Buck, Rosezelle, and myself,.. are also proficient in our speech,..too! We wrote the book with a blind man,(who has his PhD in Divinity,) and he certainly cannot "visually read ASL or any form of sign language!!" And his nerve damage would provent him from being able to manually read any form of sign language as the deaf-blind do!! Rosezelle, Buck, and myself,..we had better be REALLY good at,... if not speaking spoken speech,..then,..comprenhending it and using it!! We live in a HEARING world and how else could we communicate with Daryl if we could not speak well?
Whew! I am ranting!!!
I think I'll go get a Diet Coke and think about whether or not I will let Densmorereid have my life story!!