"Mr. DeMille! I'm ready for my close-up!"

So a few weeks ago, at a Media Training Workshop I organized for staff & volunteers from our member organizations, I met a reporter for CBC Television. We talked about the implant and she asked if I'd be willing to do a story about it. I said sure, but at the time the CBC was on strike, and I honestly thought she'd forget about it. Well, the strike's settled and she didn't - she phoned me last week and still wants to do a story.

She wants Husband and perhaps C. involved too and there has been some negotiating and accommodating of schedules but I am going to phone her tomorrow and finalize things.

I am extremely unphotogenic and unfilmgenic (is that a word?) and having done a number of tv interviews relating to my work I don't have many illusions that I am going to come off all hip and cool and cute - more like a chubby 40 year old married lady :) - but Husband and I have realized that in our own quiet way we have become apostles for the cause, and the more we can do to spread good information about CIs and their potential, the more we will do.

This feels much more important now than before for two reasons: one, on our last visit to Halifax, one of the interns told us earnestly that the money allocated to the CI program is miniscule compared to other programs (such as hip replacements, for example), and quietly urged us to do anything we could to spread the word about the life-, family- and career-changing potential of this surgery in relatively young patients; and secondly, the opening of a CI evaluation and therapy clinic in our own province means that people can get treatment right here (and, most importantly in NB, can get it in French if they wish, which they cannot in Nova Scotia); and I feel every one of us who have benefited from this program have a duty to support the program to ensure that it is kept alive and properly supported and funded.

So Lights, Camera, Action - let's go!

ronnie