By Rick Padden, American Red Cross Public Affairs
When avid hiker Kelly Greenwood hits the trail, she doesn’t hear the chirping of the birds. She can’t hear squirrels either, nor can she hear her cat’s meow at home, or watch TV without closed captions. Music is nice, but she seldom hears or understands the lyrics.
She’s used to it, however, having realized the severity of her hearing loss when she was 24, and manages to get by. But there are chirping and beeping sounds that she worries she can’t live without: the kind that smoke alarms make; the kind that can save her life.
“I have trouble hearing certain, high-pitched noises,” Greenwood said. “I can be standing right below a smoke alarm and not even hear it. Once my dog was all freaking out in the kitchen, and there I eventually saw my toaster smoking, practically on fire. My mom, who was staying with us, said the smoke alarm was going off, and I never heard it.” The dog is deaf, Greenwood said, but of course had her own smoke-detector dog’s nose.
“It’s all about the tone,” she said. “To me it doesn’t make sense. I should be able to go out and buy a fire alarm that I can hear. You can’t just go into Lowe’s and test them, though, you know? Why are they all the same tone?” Greenwood had always relied on others to sound the alarm, and had worried especially about being home alone. “If my husband isn’t here, I won’t hear a regular alarm go off,” she said. “I’d joke about it at work (as a dental assistant) and tell my co-workers to let me know if the smoke alarm goes off. Or I’d be volunteering at my sons’ school and all of a sudden everyone would be filing out, and I’d think, what? What’s going on? Oh my gosh, it’s a fire drill!”
It’s no joke though, and fortunately there are folks who’ve already addressed Greenwood’s problem. “A friend of mine posted something on Facebook about the Red Cross providing smoke alarms for the deaf and hard of hearing,” she said, “so I contacted Melissa Venable (executive director in the Loveland Red Cross office), who put me in touch with Tony Suarez (the local disaster program manager), who brought me an alarm for free.”
The one Tony provided was a bit more capable than just chirping and beeping though, and has provided Greenwood with a welcomed sense of security. “It looks like a big alarm clock and sits on my headboard,” she said. “It syncs with the smoke alarm, and has a deep voice in the tone I need. I can actually hear it.” She said the alarm also came with the new bed-shaker technology, which involves another, synchronized vibration device placed under a bed mattress. “It’ll vibrate when the alarm goes off, and a totally deaf person can feel the shaking,” she said.
Greenwood installed the bed-shaker, but said the speaking part of the alarm system was sufficient for her. “It’ll alert you in a deep voice that there’s a fire, and it’s enough,” she said. “You have to program it though, and my husband had to laugh at me. It came speaking English, and I messed it up. I don’t know what language it’s speaking now, but it doesn’t matter – I know it’s saying ‘Get out, fire!’ I wish I had one in every room.”
Greenwood recently sent a thank you note to Melissa and Tony, and while she’s thankful for the Red Cross assistance that she received, she hopes she’ll never hear that deep, foreign voice yelling at her in the wee hours of the morning.