What this blog is all about...

I am not much of a blog reader.
I have to admit that I am old and getting somewhat older most every day. Some days I age more than others but it all seems to average out. Being my age makes me want to have a piece of paper with the print and the images on it. That way I can move it about so it can hit the sweet spot on my bifocals without craning at unnatural angles such as I would at a monitor trying to catch enough pixels to make sense. I will read blogs of friends but that is about it. It takes time too much time for my neck to recover.
I am not much of blog writer either. This is my first blog and I will likely spend most of my time spell checking on Dictionary.com and rewording my sentences so that I may give the appearance of being a reasonably sane person. I would settle for any flavor of sane but reasonably sane is my goal. I have big aspirations in life.
This blog mostly will be about my experiences with my wife and her 'condition'.
My wife and good friend Bionic Fruit recently underwent surgery for a cochlear implant.
She is a saint pure and simple. She has never once said an ill word about anyone, anything or about her lot in life. She married me some twenty four years ago and has suffered mighty indignations since. I do believe that she saw me simply as a charity case in need of primping and preening so that I might become sociably acceptable. I also believe that she misunderstood my marriage proposal as a question to whether she needed another foot massage or not. In any event she said yes and here we are. All that being said, I married up and I am forever grateful to her for that.
She began to lose her hearing as a young person and has spent most of her adult life profoundly hearing impaired. That is not to say that she is totally deaf. She hears naturally only frequencies of about 850 Hertz and below. That isn't really enough of the sound spectrum to derive intelligent conversation. Maybe that is why we seem to get along... Anyway, the consonants in the English language ( The part that imparts the most meaning to the words ) lie in the sound spectrum well above her highest perceived sound. That said, still she does remarkably well -better than most- in the day to day world. She is an accomplished lip-reader and can understand most of her friends on the telephone.
Life sucks but you can learn to adapt.
Back to the cochlear implant. -Short version- Hearing bad, hearing aids don't help, cochlear implant might, therefore cochlear implant it shall be. And so it is. The implant surgery was successful in that the implant was installed and she she survived it. Beyond that is where we are today.
The implant was 'switched on' almost three weeks ago and she is deep into the learning process that it takes to learn how to hear again using electronic input instead of acoustic input. Everyone that she converses with that has had the implant tells her that it will take time and lots of it to get to a level of reliability even remotely close to natural hearing. Even now she is listening to children's books on tape with the accompanying books to re-learn the simplest sounds and forge the new pathways in her brain and yet she does not once complain. Did I mention that she is a saint?
In the coming weeks and months the squeaks, beeps, boops and other noises that she hears will begin to work it's way into being intelligible. My hope is that when she can understand what I am saying that she won't kick me to the curb. Maybe I should offer her another foot massage...