Giving My First Set of Speeches

There are only 71 days until the first game! Last week, I gave my first set of speeches. The first was at a business breakfast club that my father knows. I kind of went there as a practice for the Civitans Club at the Elks Lodge. It was nerve wracking to stand up there in front of everyone and speak! It was a good time but the biggest problem was that even with the cochlear implant I still have a hard time understanding speech in certain areas: rooms with echos, heavy accents, quiet mumbling people, and older people are all challenges. The meeting was in a pretty echo-y environment and I had a hard time understanding people. Plus most of the club members were pretty old, and several were hard of hearing. They had a hard time understanding me sometimes, and I of course, had a hard time understanding them. SO I went and spoke about my ride, about how cochlear implants "made me normal again" even with all of the obvious difficulties I was having! "Please believe me; I can hear very well thanks to the cochlear implant! Help me raise a million dollars so we can help other children hear. Believe me; the acoustics are just bad in here." Other than that, my first “public appearances” were a positive thing. We received a few donations, our first t-shirt pre-orders, and I met Eileen of the Gift of Hearing Foundation.