When it comes to communicating with the people around me, I am fortunate to have a couple different options at our disposal.
There is the eye gaze for when I’m home and plugged in. I believe that we’re quite up to speed on that machine, so I’ll spare you the ins and outs of the Dynavox. Then there’s this device that we call Low Tech and it’s comprised of a giant board with letters and words on it and a laser pointer attached to a pair of lensless glasses. I use the laser to spell out words and sentences on the board and it does an excellent job at communicating my thoughts. We also have a small sized board that we take with us when we’re out and about.
But then there are times when it’s just not practical or even possible to employ any of the methods described above. That is when we go really old school: I use my voice and everyone with whom I’m speaking gets to play 20 Questions in order to figure out what I am spelling.
This is challenging for all parties involved for several reasons. Since my tongue doesn’t work any more, a lot of my letters tend to sound the same. This makes guessing on the listeners end an exercise of extreme patience. But most of all, if you are acquainted with my personality in the slightest, you would know that I don’t think like a normal person. Sorry. 🙂
Now, a few weeks ago when I was being stretched by Robin and Lindsey at physical therapy, they were chatting about the upcoming Bay to Breakers foot race. They politely asked me if I’d ever run or walked in it and I grinned my best Yes-I-Have grin to indicate that why yes, I had walked in it one year.
I opened and closed my mouth to let the ladies know that I wanted to expand upon the subject further.
In order to keep the pace of this narrative flowing the way it is currently flowing, I will cut to the chase and eliminate the trial and error process that Robin, Lindsey, and I went through to spell those three little words that I chose to summarize and encapsulate my one and only B2B experience.
And they were (in order):
R-A-I-N
N-I-P-P-L-E-S
Owwww
(No need to spell that last one out. That word remains intact in the old verbal arsenal still).
Anyway, it didn’t take them long to figure out that it had rained on me during the course of the race and that as a result of the subsequently soaked t-shirt I was wearing, my nipples ended up getting majorly chafed and, in turn, caused me a moderate amount of pain.
And that is my Bay to Breakers story.
And that we joined the race while it was already in progress so we could watch the elite runners climb the Hayes Street hill.
We’d still be playing 20 Questions if I wanted to include that piece of information.
The Adventures of ALS Boy 