Hold the phone—please

For a hard-of-hearing person, the telephone is always an instrument of torture. Calls on cordless phones eventually degenerate into static no matter how often you change channels. Calls on wireless phones trap you in places where you cannot possibly multitask. Lately new phone troubles have arisen for me. 

Ever since the call came about my parents' health crisis in December—my mom had a stroke and my dad was hit by a bus on the same day—I've been having an overactive startle response to the ring of a phone. Before I can walk the few steps to the handset, I've begun to concoct disaster scenarios: my mother-in-law has died of an intestinal infection; my mother has had another stroke, and my dad has had a heart attack, and no one can reach my brothers; my daughter has been in an automobile accident, and her injuries are life-threatening; my son has been mugged, and he's unconscious; the cancer center needs a second blood test to rule out concerns over high tumor markers; my sister-in-law in Australia has been burned alive in the brushfires; my brother's wife has internal bleeding—all perfectly plausible.

A couple nights ago, Other was talking in his sleep. He said, "There's the phone." The words jolted me from a deep slumber, and  immediately I was fully alert and stumbling to the hall phone. It wasn't ringing, and there was no message. I spent the rest of the night too jangled to go back to sleep. Just the idea of a phone call in the wee hours was like taking crystal meth—and not in a good way.

There's another problem. My friend K has a block on her phone, so it generates an Unknown Caller message on the little screen on my phone where Caller I.D. appears. Because I always want to get her calls—particularly since she's undergoing cancer treatment—I am now answering calls that I formerly forfeited, so I'm spending my evenings talking to telemarketers, dubious researchers and pollsters. And it's not fun.