Years ago, I wrote a short story that I can’t seem to find. No matter, because it remains forever etched in my mind and I’d probably cringe at the writing anyway. At the time, I was fascinated with O’Henry-type endings. The story is about a woman walking down the street when a man with a gun walking behind her yells at her to stop or he’ll shoot. Despite the man’s repeated shouts, she doesn’t turn around. The last line was something to the effect of: “If only the battery in her hearing aid hadn’t died, she would still be alive.”<\/p>\n
This has always been one of my fears – that something horrible and preventable will happen to me because of my deafness. Every time I walk through a parking lot, I’m afraid that I’ll get hit by a car I don’t hear. And now with gun violence on the rise in a country where an average of 31 Americans are murdered with guns each day and 151 are treated for a gun assault in an ER (according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence<\/a>), the scenario I once wrote about could very well come true. <\/p>\n I hope the day will soon come when such an encounter — regardless of hearing loss — will only exist in fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Years ago, I wrote a short story that I can’t seem to find. No matter, because it remains forever etched in my mind and I’d probably cringe at the writing anyway. At the time, I was fascinated with O’Henry-type endings. The story is about a woman walking down the street when a man with a … Continue reading Stop, or I’ll shoot!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4roOt-8U","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":559,"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions\/559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmyhead.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}