then this occurred to me

I have just come to the realization that part of the mental adjustment that I've had to make with coming to grips with this is that I've never really thought of myself as a person with a physical disability.  There's having a hearing impairment, and there's being essentially deaf, and at some point I crossed that line without really even thinking about it, or even realizing it.  You know, there's a difference between recognizing that I need what the ADA people call a Reasonable Accomodation (which comes mostly in the shape of avoiding the phone at all costs and getting people to repeat things for me in conference calls) and actually *thinking* about myself as having a disability.  It's weird.  Perceptions are weird, and I think how one thinks about oneself is particularly fraught, because it often involves not just physical things that happen to us, but who we are.

Now I'm curious as to how people at work perceive me, but even though I'm willing to put up a blog where I'm discussing this whole process, I'm not particularly willing to quiz people at work.  Odds are pretty good they don't really think about me that much anyway.  I'm a coworker, not the center of their universe - and if I didn't give it much thought, I'm sure they don't.

But who I am - CIs or no, is a person with a physical disability.  If nothing else, my recent hearing assessment brought that home.  So best get used to it.  

So I'm waiting on the authorization from my insurance company.  It could be another few weeks, yet, but the people at the U are assuming it's coming.  They gave me a little bottle of antiseptic soap that I have to use before the surgery to keep my own body from causing an infection at the surgical site.  I'm putting a lot of importance on a bottle of soap, but the whole process has been fairly tootling along the tracks like an excursion train.  We all know where we're going, right?

I haven't really worked out the bilateral vs one side at a time thing yet, but I finally realized that if I were to frame the question as a formal risk assessment like the ones we do at work (see the benefits of working in the highly regulated medical device industry?) that I don't have sufficient data to complete the FMEA.  I haven't properly defined the risks or their likelihood, so I shot off an email to the audiologist at the U of M and am hoping she can provide some data.  I can't ask her what to do, but I can ask her for facts.

As a coworker used to say, stand back!  I'm going to go all sciency on this thing.