 Once again, I'm Ann Thomas. I'm the president of the Hearing Loss Association of America, the Diabla Valley Chapter. We'd like to welcome everybody to our meeting today on this holiday weekend, even though I'm assuming most of you are like me and you're really not going anywhere to be around a whole lot of people. So historically, we give this presentation about emergency planning in September. We've been doing that for about five years, I think. I don't think we could have picked a more auspicious time than to do it this year in this month. So before we get going on our presentation, we're going to do a little bit of housekeeping for people who may not be quite familiar with how to use some of the important features of Zoom. And obviously, the most important one is how to turn on the captions. Now, I'm assuming for everybody that they should be automatically running now, but if by some chance, you're not seeing them on your screen. If you look at the live transcript icon, which has the square around it, a new window will open up and it says in there you have three options. The first one is subtitles that turns on the closed caption. If you want to increase the size of the captions, you click on the second one, and there's a slider bar in there. You can slide it to whatever size suits you to be able to read the captions. If by some chance, you're like me and sometimes you don't really quite remember, you don't really quite realize that you didn't understand what somebody said and the captions have already passed. If you turned on the full transcript, there's a full running transcript of the meeting, and you can scroll back in there to see what one, two, three, maybe a whole concept that you missed. Since there's so many of us, it's too hard to identify who wants to speak when it comes time to Q&A, so we'd like to ask that everybody please raise their hands. And how you do that is in the reactions button in the toolbar, which is the smiley face with a plus. When you click on that, the first option says raise hand, and Alan Katsura just raised his hand and you see a hand in the thumbnail for the person who did that. Now, for those of us who are doing the behind the scenes work here to make sure that this movie runs well, like Alan, Zoher, and Jill, what happens in our participants window is it orders the people who raise their hand first, so we don't have to really worry about a person waiting, hopefully forever, because they raised their hand, that puts them in the order of the way people raise their hands. Something that still is hard for a lot of people to figure out is the fact that you control how you view your screen, and whether the presentation is bigger or whether the person who's talking is bigger. Now, sometimes I know that a presentation, somebody might make the text of the slides so little I can hardly read it. So if that happens, I like the presentation side bigger. So the way that you adjust that screen size is see this circle in the middle of the picture between the presentation on the left and Zoher's picture on the right. If you click on those lines, you can drag them back and forth to be able to adjust the size of the windows. We'd like to remind everybody about the importance of an external microphone. If you have one, you might want to think about using it in the next meeting, because it makes it much clearer for everybody to understand you. It's not about when you use the microphone what you can understand, but about what other people understand. And actually, I went too fast on this one slide because I missed one of the most important ones. Whoops. I'm going to go back to it. And it's about speaking. I know when I get excited or what I get nervous. I usually speak faster than normal. And as all of us know, one of the big things is we want everybody to speak slower to make sure that we can connect all the thoughts and all the words. And it also is helpful to Corey, who's doing our captions, helps her be able to create the most act helps him be able to create the most accurate captions. So now to get to the meat of what we're all here to remind ourselves the things that we need to do. I don't know if you're like me, but watching the news this past week has been just emotionally devastating as I'm watching our state burn and thanking God that it's not us in our county at this time, but it could be us. And so we really need to direct attention, especially because we're hard of hearing to ensure that we're prepared. So are you prepared this week? Then the news has been everywhere in California wildfires. We also have a need to know what to do because of earthquakes. So we happen to have federal, state, and local agencies that have laid out plans for us to be to help us do what we need to do what we need to do to be prepared. I'm going to talk to you today about the national and statewide programs. And Alan could sir, we'll talk to you about cert, which he's very actively involved in. So we have a national program called ready.gov. And it's a public service campaign. And it wants us to be informed about potential emergencies to make a family plan to build an emergency kit and to act to be prepared for emergencies. And if you click on the ready gov link and you know, all of our meetings are recorded. And we have a YouTube channel. So you don't need to take notes, you can go back and watch our presentations on YouTube. So each one of these websites has extensive information in them about how to prepare what to do additional resources. And in putting together the presentation this year, I updated all of the information on the slides. And in order to do that, I went back to make sure that there was something new on any of these sites. And I really encourage you to take a look. I felt really proud that I'm fortunate to live in a country that has these wonderful tools for us. In California, we have Cal Fire. Their slogan is plan no act. Over and over again, you're going to hear on all the programs similar message. We're recommending that you download the wildfire app and sign up for text alerts. I had done this a long time ago. And I'd never been alerted to anything. Well, I think it was about six weeks ago, my husband and I were watching TV or actually probably Netflix. And all of a sudden, both of our cell phones had the fire alert on it. And we were both so unnerved because that had never happened to us before that it really made us sit up and take notice. And it was being alerted by I don't know if you all remember, but there was a fire in Livermore. And I'm thinking, oh, Livermore, that's not that far away. But you know what? If it had been a big fire, it could have been a big deal. So I really liked it. And now I feel a little more secure, because I know that I'm going to receive a notice and if I'm anywhere near my phone, I'll get it. So the wildfire action plan, you create an evacuation plan. You build an emergency supply kit. And the motto is ready, set, go. The evacuation plan, one of the first components that you need to have is communication. So for most of us, or a lot of us in our area, we live in one level, one story housing. And so it's much easier to get out of one story housing than it may be to get out of two story housing. But it's still something you need to take time to think about. What are the easiest ways to get out of your house? What's the easiest way to get from your street to someplace else? So some streets only have one way in and one way out. Other streets have multiple ways to to be conscious of and to know and have a discussion in your family about how to approach that. The second thing that you need to do is you need to discuss a designated meeting location out of the fire or hazard zone. I mean, all of us can easily imagine your mate, your partner, whoever is out, you're at home, they hear the fire alert, they where do where do you go to connect with each other later? So you need to create some meeting location that everybody in your family knows about so everybody would go to that location so you can reconnect. You also need to designate somebody outside of the immediate area as the central contact person. Other family members are normally going to be trying to find out if you're all right. So there needs to be somebody that you have who wouldn't be affected by any kind of evacuation that everybody knows to contact. So in my family, my husband's family lives in North Carolina. So there are designated contact people. So anybody in my family or friends would know if they wanted to know about me that that's who they should contact for the latest information. So be prepared. What are some other things that you need to know about and being prepared? Well the first thing is fire extinguishers. Do you have a fire extinguisher? Do you know how to use it? So where is your gas and your electric and your water shut off mains? So something that's going to happen for us in an earthquake is all of us are going to really need to know where our gas shut off valves are and how to use them. So at my house we have a wrench that we have automatically attached right to the area where you turn off the gas because gas is going to be a real issue if we had an earthquake and fires. And so you don't have to go looking for the wrench if it's attached right to the area where gas shut off valve is. And once again you're going to keep hearing the same things over and over again. A list of emergency contact numbers near or in your emergency supply kit. And later on in the presentation we're going to go through what you need to have in your emergency supply kit as a heart of hearing person and also what things that you need to have in your emergency supply kit as recommended by the American Red Cross. So the three steps to prepare. Get a kit, make a kit, make a plan and be informed about what's going on in the area around you. Here we're going to talk about building an emergency supply kit and this is specific to people with hearing loss because we have unique needs that aren't addressed in the American Red Cross list. One of the most important things that I can remind everybody to do is to write down and know the make and model and serial number of your hearing device. When we had the initial huge fires in several years ago, what happened was all of the audiologist offices were burned in Santa Rosa. People ran out of their houses with almost nothing and the hearing and speech center in San Francisco, so people left their hearing aids behind. So the hearing and speech center in San Francisco, which is a really wonderful organization, if you don't know anything about them, you need to take a look and maybe participate in some of their fundraising events every year. They contacted all the hearing aid manufacturers on behalf of the people who lost their homes in the fire and the hearing aid manufacturers were willing to replace everybody's hearing aids if they had the serial number of the hearing aids. So make sure you have the serial number of your devices somewhere in your kit. You also need to have extra hearing aid batteries. Now a situation that's arising for many of us is that many of our hearing devices are going to rechargeable batteries so that we could be potentially in a difficult situation. All of you know that I now have two cochlear implants and fortunately one of the options in addition to the rechargeable batteries which I have is they have a battery that you can add regular batteries to to substitute and so I definitely have that in my kit. Something else you need to have is how to think about battery charging. You need it for your hear it potentially for your hearing devices. You could need it for your smart devices. I remember last year the year before when we had they turned off our electricity. I had an additional battery charger but my electricity was off for five days. I had to go to my car, charge some of my smart devices. I had to charge my battery charger in my car so keep thinking about because none of the places around me had electricity either. So keep thinking about the multiple ways that you would need to have to recharge devices that you have that need a charge. The other piece here is that a lot of us now are also using our smart devices as the remote control for our hearing aids or our cochlear implants. So it's not just that it would be a way to communicate. We need it to be able to function right? So there are battery packs and they come by size by how much charge they hold. So when you go to look at buying one be conscious of you want one that's big enough that you can charge enough things. You want to make sure that you have the plug in your car if your car doesn't already have one built in that allows you to plug in a USB port into the car so that you can charge your phone your battery pack anything else that you might need. There are also solar rechargeable battery options a possibility that could interfere with that as we could have bad air or no sun so not be able to recharge the solar recharger. You need to be cognizant of having apps for communication speech to text just because we're talking about this doesn't mean that we're going to be in the state of mind to even remember all of our emergency kits or you may be someplace else where away from your home and it's not in your car. So everybody really needs to think about having a speech to text app on their smart device and as all of you know I love Ava and one of the reasons that I love Ava is because you can preserve social distancing. In addition to the horrific images we're seeing of people evacuating the fires nobody has a face mask well I'm vaccinated I'm assuming almost everybody is on who's on this meeting today is vaccinated but there's still our breakthrough infections and we want to make sure that we can communicate with others if we have problems with our hearing aids they can download Ava on their app too you can do it as a distance so you're not stuck and you all know forever I've been advocating the use of a pocket talker as part of your emergency preparedness kit and you in addition to having a neck loop with it I highly recommend that you throw in some headphones there because you know if you lost your hearing aids or you didn't have your hearing aids you could probably still maybe get by with a pocket talker but you would need to have headphones to connect to that because without your hearing aids you couldn't connect your hearing aids via a neck loop because you'd have no telecoil. These are the recommendations for the American Red Cross for everybody and in a conversation I had recently they were using the term oh this is for everybody but then they were making an additional piece oh and people with hearing loss so this is not for everybody we're part of the everybody that's what I'm trying to say so everybody needs a three-day supply of food three gallons of water per person you need medications and I've read a couple weeks of medications they're recommending right now and a first aid kit you need a flashlight and a whistle something could happen we could have an earthquake and you'd be stuck in your house and people would be calling to you but you wouldn't be able to hear them so to keep calling out you'd be exhausted so whistling is a very easy thing to do and I have a whistle that was given to me a long time ago by HLAA California and it's a little whistle like this and this whistle has a low tone so it's very easy to blow it's a three-tone whistle maybe it's something we should think about for our chapter and just make sure that everybody has one you want an extra set of car keys you want to make sure you have money I mean I carry very little money today my credit cards are the end of the world you know so you need money you need your credit cards you may even need traveler's checks depending on how bad things are and copies of important documents and for all of us right now our COVID vaccination card is probably one of the most important things we also need to think about emergency alerting devices that are special for people who have hearing loss we need a smoke detector we need a carbon monoxide detector and you probably need some kind of weather radio so this one I've listed a NOAA weather radio with a strobe for those of you who attended our last meeting we had sonic alert here with the home aware talking about the new home aware device that we're able to get from the california telephone access program called CTAP and you're able to get the basic unit but they do offer additional accessory items one of the accessory items is a smoke and carbon monoxide detector which I got mine yesterday I should have had one for years right you know how many times how many times I've given this presentation and I actually really got the one to go to home aware and it came yesterday and it's a little additional piece about this size and you pair it with a device I put it in my bedroom I don't have my weather radio yet home aware also has an accessory for the radio and so I need to decide which one I'm going to get so doing these presentations every every year it's not just for you it's for me too you know none of us are none of us have all of our ducks in a row another option that we have that's really really valuable and if you happen to live in the san ramon fire protection district the san ramon fire protection district has smart one one the other fire protection district that's in contra costa county does not have that I have contacted them numerous times about it I would like to encourage other people to contact them as it could be a chapter project so smart one one adds auxiliary information to 911 when you call it so anytime you would go through an area that had 911 if something happened and you called it from an area that you had your phone they would have additional information about you and you're able to input the information that you want them to have could be your medication I have on that I have on mind that I'm hard of hearing and now I have two cochlear implants we don't have any pets I have my husband listed so before 911 arrives wherever I am they automatically know that I'm hard of hearing and I think that's a really really valuable notification because I don't know my implant is just held on to my head with a magnet if I do this lots of times I knock them off so if I was in an accident or something I might not have them all so you all might lose a hearing aid too or maybe not even have them so I really encourage you to take a look at smart 911 we have a special program from our pacific gas and electric company it's called the safety action center and it's a self-generated program you go on the program safety action center that's right here and follow go just take a look at what they have there you know all of these things could save our lives someday and now I'm going to hand the presentation over to Alan who's going to talk to us about cert which he has actively been involved with for many years so Alan can you access the slide deck now I might to unmute so you're still mute Alan I know I can't you want unmute now do you want me to advance the slides and you just tell me so a minute ago you were unmute can you try again you as the house must unmute him I can hear you Alan okay no wait a second wait I got a zoom issue here I can hear him okay yeah I just I just got it back let me get everything reorganized here so Alan uses multiple screens he has one screen that he walks that watch this the presentation and he has another screen he views everybody on so are you ready to go okay advance the slides I got it now perfect thank you okay so give me a control the slide deck okay and are you going to give me control the where okay I got it okay first of all I'm going to put some information in the chat there are links that I'll be referring to later I also have my contact information there and if you want to save this information if you have your chat window open in the lower right hand corner there's a three dots and in that menu that opens up there's a save chat option there and it will save it to if you're on a pc it saves it to your document zoom file okay so I'm going to allow some of you to ask questions on this first part of the session so please use the raised hand feature for that so what do you do in an emergency anybody can respond anybody call 911 yeah we call 911 so now what are your expectations when you call 911 you'll be put on hold okay no well what are your expectations not what's going to happen so I would think that you would probably call 911 and expect a timely response from professional first responders whether it's please or fire or whatever now what happens when you call 911 and are told that resources may not be available for hours or maybe even days well and Dana Bellweather has her hand up okay Dana yeah I wanted to mention one thing that surprised me when I dialed 911s is how huge an area each dispatcher serves um I she asked where I was and I gave her the streets that intersected where I was and she said yeah but what town so you could be anywhere so you have to start with like okay California Santa Rosa and then the intersection okay um thank you for the information Dana and you can lower your hand it's in the same place as reactions as reactions reactions reactions oh okay okay so if you're told that resources may not be available for hours or days that is what you would call a disaster in more than one way so limited resources are outweighed by the demand communities rely on organizations like CERC to supplement the first responders want to excuse me want to create relay relies on CERC during the first hours of a disaster to compile information on the extent of initial damages we have CERC programs throughout Contra Costa County in western Contra Costa County we have La Borenda which is Lafayette, Moraga and Arunda there's programs in Wannacree, Pleasant Hill, Martinez, Concord, San Ramon and I know there are additional programs throughout the county so who are CERC's who are these people well like Ann said previously I am a CERC Evelyn Turnstrom who is one of our members who's not here today is a CERC but her husband Ray is not something Evelyn and I have in common it's a training we receive when we first volunteered for CERC and continue to receive in fact I see that Albert is here today I think Albert is a CERC too so the basic training for CERC includes about 24 hours of classroom and hands-on training we have opportunities to add to add to or refresh our skills every year we learn we learn about disaster preparedness as an individual a family and as a community we train in disaster medical operations disaster psychology light certain rescue and more we work within the scope of our training and do not allow ourselves to become victims if you are interested in joining a CERC program you can contact me again my information is in the chat and include what city and or town you reside in I think that most program training has been suspended for the past year and a half because of COVID and some programs I know one of CERC is exploring this are going to hybrid training programs that was developed during COVID this incorporates online lessons and tests combined with an opportunity to display your skills in person I would like to introduce a couple of additional resources that you may not be familiar with oops if you or someone you know you use electrically powered medical equipment the independent living resources of Solano and Contra Costa County administers a program that offers free backup power supplies to qualifying individuals who require emergency power during times when power is not available these could be machines like CPAP machines and oxygen generators everyone is familiar with Red Cross's fundraising efforts and blood drives what you may not know is they also supply information on how to prepare for emergencies and offer volunteer and educational programs our chapter has partnered with Rossmore emergency preparedness organization or EPO the last few years and with last year being an exception because of COVID we will once again participate in the safety fair this year this time in a virtual environment on September 18th you can go to their website RossmoreEPO.org for updated information Rossmore EPO is designed for Rossmore residents but the website has good general information videos from previous meetings on a variety of emergency related topics and how to register for emergency alerts at this time I'm going to give this presentation back to Anne so we'd like to remind everybody that in addition to the information that we've talked about today and I want everybody to know that all of the links that were in the in the presentation are hot so you should be able to click on them at a later time and be able to be taken right to the location so on our website we have a tab called information and we have extensive information about a variety of topics including emergency planning and also fire and carbon monoxide dangers we also have two brochures and these brochures are also on our website and if we were in person we'd be handing out the brochures to everybody to make sure that they have them so in this particular brochure that's the disaster planning brochure the middle of the brochure has this checklist and so in actuality you can take this checklist and just check the pieces that you have already accomplished so that you know where you are and what you still need to do we also have a fire safety and carbon monoxide brochure many of us are in denial about our ability to hear without our devices in and especially when we're sleeping so we may stand underneath our smoke detector and you know the smoke detectors have such a horrible piercing loud sound when you had what would be considered to be normal hearing it's really hard to imagine that you couldn't be awakened by that sound that you remember to protect you from a fire or carbon monoxide the reality is great that you will not be able to hear that in enough time so you have something like three minutes to be awakened and be out of your house so you want to make sure that you have everything in place to be able to do that there are three ways that we are commonly alerted by sound which the normal sound of a smoke and carbon monoxide detector is the high frequency sound which we can't hear by vibration you could have your devices connected to a bed shaker or by strobe and having all of those together increases your ability to be able to get out of your house in the time that you need now I need to mention here that there is one specific device and it's the picture there that looks kind of like an old-time portable radio with a button on the top with a microphone and that has a low tone frequency so it doesn't sound at the really loud sound this hears your smoke detector and emits another sound so you can't have too many things I have one of these as well I have it in a different part of my house so you can think about having multiple devices in different locations and so this brochure is here for you to help you be able to prepare for the things that you might need in case of a fire so that ends the portion of our program when we were providing you with information and we're opening it up now to Q&A for all of you to talk about anything that you would like so we'd like to ask you to please raise your hand and you find it on your toolbar so who has the first question Alan I see your hand is up and Jill are you going to call on people do you want to call on people today okay Alan yes okay I have a couple of comments from when Anne was talking about turning off the gas and using fire extinguishers and as far as fire extinguishers go the first thing you should do if you have a fire is called 9-1-1 and in cases where you think you need to turn off your gas you don't just blindly go out and turn off the gas for no reason at all you should make sure that you actually have a gas leak and there are various ways you could tell one is by the odor of the gas another is you could go out to the meter and you see the meter advancing rapidly there could be hissing sounds and in those cases you could go ahead turn the gas off the reason you don't want to just turn it off if you don't need to is because the gas has to be turned on by PG&E and if it's like in a disaster type situation it could be days before they could get around to doing it because they'll have other more pressing matters going on Barbara I thought it was a wonderful presentation that both Anne and Alan gave and I thought it was it was many of us have heard similar pieces and parts of it before but I thought this was presented in a very in a very concise way the only the only thing that came to mind that I thought of that maybe wasn't mentioned at all was about and I'm thinking about those people I guess all leaving Tahoe at the same time that we've been watching pictures of is that another thing to be considered is that you have some gas in your car and because getting gas in an emergency is just about impossible so I know some people don't like to let their cars get below a half a tank of gas and things like that and it's hard to make exact rules but it's something to always think about when you're when your gas tank gets low is maybe not let it get as low as you always do so it's not got a limit I don't know what is recommended I know some people that don't let their gas tank get below a half a tank that's a little extreme but nonetheless you your ability to leave Tahoe I'm sure last week was dependent on how much gas you had in your tank at the time because trying to stop at a gas station on the way out was probably just about impossible that's the only comment that I had I thought the presentation was very complete and if we all did that we would just be so much safer thank you Barbara that was great Rich yes I have a question for Alan can you make sure that we can see your face there we go thank you okay my question is for Alan how do we find out who is cert trained I live in a community 55 plus community and I don't know who if anyone is cert trained so how do we find out and my second comment would be along with what Barbara was saying is if your car is in a garage you may be surprised that you can't get your car out of the garage because of the power being out I know a woman who had a serious problem with us during one of our fires we have many fires here in Santa Rosa and she had to leave on foot because she couldn't get her car out of the garage so what many of us do now is if there is a chance of a fire evacuation we pull her car out of the garage and park it on the street so that we can get away so anyway to the other question my question Alan was how do we find out who is cert just a comment on the garage doors most electric garage door openers that I've seen have a manual release that you could pull and open the garage door manually but as far as cert goes you probably wouldn't know often who the certs are the certs aren't people that are going off by themselves to do anything it's an organization and it works on the incident command principle so if there was an emergency what the cert would do is make sure they're immediate family safe then they would check their immediate neighborhood to see if there's anything that they could do or take information on before they go to their area that they're supposed to meet and from there they would organize and get dispatched into certain specialties and go on from there so it's not necessarily like you're going to have a certain area and that person is going to be responsible for that area or anything they're all under an incident command system so everything is being dispatched from higher up and if you go to the cert website does it show the local cert contacts and everybody in each individual area? In this area they have a program an organization for Contra Costa County that lists all the cert programs. I have a list of most of those areas and let's see here if you go to the city that you're in if you look under emergency preparedness they would normally tell you if they have a cert program and how to contact people if you're interested in the program but I don't think they'll go around just giving out information like who is your cert person in that area. I just want to comment as Alan mentioned we at cert are under command and there is a command post that normally forms in Rossmore by Gateway so cert volunteers are ordered to go to the command post and that's where people needing assistance would have to go in case of an emergency. So everybody that's Al Kadov and he doesn't have his video on so that's why you couldn't see who was talking. I'm in my PJs. Okay Dana you're next. Dana? Wrong Dana. If you look at your thumbnail whether you'll see that your hand is up. Oh okay um I wanted to know if you're uh the other Dana is still the one that's outlined. Anyway um I wanted to know whether if you're evacuating then you should turn the gas off just in case uh there's further shaking or fire and it keeps going back to Dana. Um I haven't really come across that it's a good question and I could find out for you. Um there's from my perspective there's positives and negatives on both situations. Like you said if there's in the case of like an earthquake or there's aftershocks that may cause gas leakage then that may be an issue. The issue the other point is if that if there isn't a problem with gas then you're into that period that if you're a resident that's livable that you go back to it and then you'll have to wait for the resources to become available for them to turn the gas back on. But if you like I'll look into it and see what the recommendations are on it. That's okay I think the risk of a huge explosion is so much greater than the risk of having to eat sandwiches I would just turn it off. Okay thank you Dana. Yeah thank you Dana. Walt unmute yourself maybe I can do it hang on. So Walt you need to unmute yourself. Okay uh my understanding a you can install a device that automatically shuts off the gas. That's all the comments I have. Can you tell us some more about that device? Who do you contact to get it? I can. I can. Go ahead. Okay so on your gas meters they could put a device in that when it detects movement it will shut the gas off. So if it was an earthquake then yes it'll shut it off. Sensitivity could be an issue because it may be something that's relatively mild but it may detect it and shut the gas off when there isn't a need to. But it still doesn't shut the gas off if there's a gas leak because it's not caused by an earthquake. If there's some sort of gas leak there's no way for it to actually detect that. But yes you can have those gauges installed on your system. Um I'm not sure if PG&E administers that or not could probably go to the website to find out. So Walt do you have one on your house? Does anybody have that on their house? Okay I used to have one when I lived in Berkeley but as Alan mentioned if a truck went by the street and caused some motion then it would shut it off. So you have to be careful and determine whether or not you want to install such a device. Anybody else have anything else to contribute, a question, experience from having been through a fire? Earthquake? Oh one thing I don't know whether it was on the list but remember your meds. Muffin. Bob's Astro historically has always distributed homemade muffins to at all of our chapter meetings so since we can't meet in person this is Bob's muffin virtually to all of us. We have a few announcements. The first thing everybody needs to be signed up to HLAA's eNews so that you really know what's going on and there have been recently there have been some really big announcements of things that are going on and the one that I have on the screen here is a bill has been introduced in 2021 to cover hearing aids and hearing health care. So we've all complained for as long as I can ever remember about the fact that Medicare doesn't include hearing aids or hearing health care. So if you want to ensure that we get what we really all want and need you need to contact your senators your your House of Representatives members and let them know that you want them to vote yes for this bill. So while I was getting prepared for this presentation I followed I followed my own directions that I'm telling you right now and I went ahead and went online and sent a letter to Diane Feinstein and Padilla and our local representative as well. It's super simple to do and I can show you on I left the HLAA website up I think to be able to show you let me see if I can find it here the link hang on one second okay so when you go to the HLAA website and I know a lot of people don't do this that frequently so we're going to be continuing to show people how to use the website. If you don't know how to find something here's the magnifying search glass you type in Medicare because we're talking about Medicare and this is alert action Medicare coverage for hearing aids we need to hear from you see here where it says read more you can click that see the hand see the cursor is changing to a hand anytime the cursor changes to a hand that means it's a live link and click on it okay so here is it takes you to the action alert let your voice be heard here's how you find your representative here's how you find your senators they have even given you a demonstration letter so all you needed to do if you liked their letter is copy and paste it but make sure that you would remove this part here and you would put the person's name in there so everybody needs to do this you have no excuse for not doing this okay I want to see everybody do a thumbs up in the reactions so if you had see the happy face with a plus you open that up you have the ability to do reactions so if you look at my thumbnail see I did thumbs up so we definitely want to support let our representatives know that they need to support this for us and it's also a way to make us more visible because I know that for all of our representatives hearing loss has not been high on their agenda and so all of a sudden in California it will be raised on their agenda because we're letting them know so this is the 31st anniversary of the ADA and everybody needs to be reminded over and over and over again that people with hearing loss live uncertain lives we never know when you're going to be able to understand somebody and when you're not so if you want to live the best life you can possibly live as a course of action you need to ask for communication access so with my new implants I'm doing so well I'm shocked every single day about what I can hear but there's sometimes I can't hear I participated in a Zoom meeting recently and I could understand half of the people in the Zoom meeting and half of the people who I couldn't and some of the people had accents so if I hadn't asked for accommodations for that meeting I would have missed half of what was being said and I know as a whole our group is not asking for accommodations so you might be wondering where can you have accommodations where are the places it's everywhere every single place you go to you need to ask for it including your grocery store your grocery store has an information counter you go up to that counter can you understand them you can write to the CEOs of these companies and request accommodations the more they hear from more people the greater the likelihood is that they're going to be following the law I've had many people tell me oh I asked and they said they didn't have anything well then you have to get more forceful and you have to let them know that you understand that they're telling you they're not aware of what they have but that they're in violation of the law the law in our country is mandating that they provide accommodations for us now in providing accommodations for us it's our responsibility also to have an idea of what works for us because you need to ask for what you want what you need at the moment I still cannot understand anybody in a face mask so in every single healthcare setting that I have been to in recent times I have asked for captions it's been like pulling teeth to get what I need to be able to understand but I've been asked to be on two specific committees at UCSF one of them I've been asked to spearhead a disability access community committee that will be for patients family and visitors another committee I've been asked to be on is a consortium we had a meeting recently there were 18 different departments in the hospital represented in that committee now I have my fingers crossed there isn't going to have to be a lawsuit against the UC California hospital system to get them to do something and they are showing interest in doing this now the way that you make the most the most noise in the hospital system is every single visit that you're having with your physician and hospitals they're sending you emails later asking how your visit your visit went and it usually has a little survey with it well those surveys actually are not directly from the hospital they're from an outside agency and the outside agency has to report every disapproval so every time you you participate in any event like that you have to highlight they might have been fabulous in every single way but you couldn't understand them so what good does it do how good their healthcare services are if you physically cannot understand what they're saying you're you're thinking that they want you to take your medication appropriately they're thinking that they want you to be able to prepare for a surgery so that these are not small things and I want to tell every single person who is here in this meeting today you are worth it if you have a problem in and of yourself thinking that you're worth it I want you to know I'm telling you I think you're worth it I think we're all worth it and I'm expending a tremendous amount of my life energy to be able to ensure that I and all of you can live the best lives you possibly can have with hearing loss so please step up with me oops and here's our information for anybody who may need to contact us and I have some we have time here today and I'd love to open up the conversation about what are the difficulties that people have in asking for accommodations what do they run into so I know through the years I was listening to our chapter members and everybody kept saying I don't know what to do I don't know what to do so this brochure was created to help everybody but I'm still hearing from people well maybe yes maybe no I'm hearing from people that oh I can bring my husband with you that's not okay they're not allowed to do that they're not allowed to use your family members to be the interpreter for you and one of the major reasons this is so important is you don't know for sure that they're telling you exactly what that doctor said so you know how hard it can be I mean we all have arguments with our spouses family members and things communication in and of itself is not simple you always have to verify somebody responds in a wrong way or what in a way that you didn't intend you're going oh well they must have heard something different than what I intended to say so if you have good communication skills you might check in and say oh the look on your face didn't fit what I thought I said I'm wondering if you heard something differently so we have no way of verifying that for sure that something that would be the quasi interpreter is telling you what was really said in some families family members hide how serious an illness is from family members we all have a right to know that so does anybody want to talk about some problems that they have it might help other people be able to speak feel more comfortable speaking up