For R Divya, the past week was one of the best in recent times as she finally secured financial help to get her daughter Martia John’s hearing aids serviced.
Martia, hailing from Alambadi in Lalgudi taluk, was diagnosed with a hearing problem when she was two years old. In early 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, her hearing aid (the external device) stopped working and Divya could not afford to get it repaired. Servicing it costs anywhere between Rs 60,000 and Rs 1 lakh, she said.
After knocking several doors, she finally found help in Satheesh Kumar, a government school teacher in Lalgudi. He arranged for funds amounting to a little over Rs 1 lakh and gave the aid for service.
Kumar said, “I want the child to have a good life and study well. She has lost the progress she made in speaking owing to the issue in the device. As she was unable to get it fixed, she was not wearing the hearing aids for almost two years.”
Hailing from a modest background, Divya has faced several hardships. She suffered polio at the age of two. “I have lived life as a disabled person and I know the struggles. I will not let my child go through the same. My husband works at a local two-wheeler shop. It is difficult to make ends meet. We managed all
these years by taking loans and sometimes ran out of money to even take loans,” she
said.
She added that her daughter suffered a bout of fits when she was one-and-a-half-years old and after that she could not hear. The cochlear implant surgery cost more than Rs a8 lakh. She had petitioned to the then Collector seeking help and Martia got the surgery done at MGMGH in 2017. She also went for speech therapy for a year, due to which her regular schooling got delayed, Divya said.
Martia is now in Class 3 at a government school in Alambadi.
It was recently that the State government included cochlear accessory services for CMCHIS beneficiaries. Dr Palaniappan, HOD ENT department, MGMGH, said, “The most important factor is the one-year rehab/speech therapy. It is very important to maintain the external device well.”