Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 11, 1993 TAG: 9302110324
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WENDI GIBSON RICHERT STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
HELPING HER HEAR
WHEN Diane Pellitteri brought her daughter, Christi McManama, to Roanoke's Miracle-Ear Center in October, she was counting on scraping together the $2,000 or so a pair of hearing aids would cost. That was a lot of money she didn't have.Pellitteri already had been turned down for financial aid by Children's Specialty Services, who disqualified her because her husband, from whom she is now separated, had recently opened a business.
But for 8-year-old Christi, whose 30-percent-to-40-percent hearing loss in both ears contributed to her repeating the first grade, hearing aids seemed her only hope of living happily in a hearing world.
Pellitteri called hearing-aid companies to price the aids Christi needed. The costs were indeed high, but Pellitteri's parents said they'd help. Miracle-Ear Hearing Center was the first place she visited.
Pellitteri was more than surprised - and relieved - however, when she talked to Miracle-Ear's consultant, Kathie Davenport. Davenport told her about the Miracle-Ear Children's Foundation, a non-profit wing of the hearing-aid company that distributes hearing aids free to children of qualified families.
The foundation, barely 2 years old, has a nationwide goal of fitting 50 children with hearing aids each month. But, says Davenport, the number of children receiving the devices falls nowhere near that.
"The services are here," she says. "And it really seems a shame to me" that people don't use them. She concedes, however, that it's not a matter of people not choosing the service. They simply don't know about it.
For Pellitteri, hearing about the service "was a total shock to me."
The foundation operates as a charity. All the work - including manufacturing the free hearing aids - that Miracle-Ear employees do is on a volunteer basis, though not always outside the regular workweek.
"You can't pay to advertise something done for a charitable cause," Davenport says. "We have to rely on word-of-mouth and human-interest stories."
As of December 1992, more than 400 children nationwide had been fitted by the foundation, 12 to 15 in Western Virginia, the territory covered by the seven centers that include the Miracle-Ear Center in Roanoke.
That's not a lot in a country with an estimated 2 million hearing-impaired children, Davenport said. "If there are 2 million [of these] children in the U.S., then there have to be some in Roanoke."
Christi, who didn't wish to talk to a reporter about her new hearing aids, is the first child Davenport fitted with the free devices.
Christi was diagnosed with nerve deafness at age 3. Her mother said doctors told her then - and later - that hearing aids would never help Christi. But she recently learned from Roanoke Valley Speech and Hearing that the aids were the only thing that would help Christi's hearing problem.
Though she's apprehensive about wearing the behind-the-ear devices, Christi is hearing sounds she had never heard before - crickets, televisions, words called out for her spelling tests at school.
Pellitteri said Christi asked recently why God gave her a hearing problem. "I told her, `Well, I don't know that he did, but if he did, he did it for a reason. Maybe you're going to grow up and be a teacher who teaches deaf children.' "
Christi's new hearing aids are allowing her to live more comfortably, despite her difficulty adjusting to wearing them. Pellitteri said that now, when she asks Christi if she hears a certain sound, Christi's answer is more and more often "yes."