09/09/2026
My Daughter Needed $1,847 for Cochlear Processor Batteries. The Woman Who Wrote the Grant That Saved Her Was Me.
Fourteen percent of children with profound hearing loss lose access to their cochlear implants within five years because their families cannot afford the $1,847 processor batteries and replacement coils. I wrote that statistic into a federal grant proposal in 2019. My sister quoted it back to me at Thanksgiving as proof I was a bad mother.
"You should really apply for assistance, June. There are programs. My friend Kelsey works in nonprofits."
Kelsey worked in donor relations at a regional arts council. She had never touched a pediatric audiology grant in her life.
I said, "I know about the programs."
"Then why is Nora wearing that old processor?"
The processor was eight months old. It was matte gray. It was the standard N7 model that insurance covered after I filed the appeal myself, twice, and cited the exact case law that forced them to reverse. My sister Whitney did not know what a processor looked like new versus old. She thought old meant scuffed. Nora had been climbing rocks at the state park in October. That was the scuffing.
I did not say any of this.
I said, "It works fine."
We were in my mother's kitchen in Chapel Hill, the one with the tile my father laid in 1994, the same tile that had a crack near the dishwasher shaped like Florida. I had noticed that crack when I was nine and pointed it out and my father had said, real serious, that's why we can never move, we have the whole state right here. I loved him for that. He died in 2016, and the tile was still there, and Whitney had put a decorative rug over it because she said it looked trashy.
Whitney is a pediatric dental hygienist. She earns $58,000 a year and drives a leased Q5 and tells everyone at church she is in healthcare. My mother introduces her as "my daughter, in medicine."
My mother introduces me as "June. She works with computers."
I do not work with computers. I am a senior program officer at a federal health equity initiative housed inside HHS. I write and administer grants that fund pediatric cochlear implant access nationwide. In 2019 I wrote the funding mechanism that pays for my own daughter's batteries through her school district's assistive technology allocation. I did not tell my family because when I got into public policy at twenty-two, my mother said, "Well, someone has to do the paperwork, I guess."
She said it like paperwork was a lesser sin.
So I let it be paperwork. For seventeen years I let it be paperwork.
I moved to Bethesda. I married a man named David who understood the difference between what a woman does and what a woman is. We had Nora. Nora failed her newborn hearing screen. Nora got her first implant activated at fourteen months and said "mama" at nineteen months and cried the first time she heard a lawnmower because it was too big a sound for such a small girl.
David died of a pulmonary embolism in a hotel in Denver in 2021. He was thirty-nine. Nora was four.
I moved back to North Carolina because I could not sleep in our house anymore and because my mother offered, and because I thought maybe grief would soften the thing between us. It did not. It made it worse. My mother now had proof that I could not manage my own life, and Whitney had proof that her married-with-a-house-in-Raleigh existence was correct.
So there we were. Thanksgiving 2024. Nora was seven. She was under the table feeding turkey to my mother's spaniel. Whitney was pouring w**e and talking about assistance programs.
"June, seriously. I can put you in touch with Kelsey. She helps people like you."
People like me.
My mother said, "Whitney is only trying to help."
I looked at my daughter under the table. Her processor was clipped behind her ear, the magnet holding the coil against her scalp under her hair. The battery in that processor would last about sixty hours. The next one was already in my purse. The next hundred were guaranteed through 2027 under a program I had built line by line in a conference room in Rockville while my daughter napped in a Pack 'n Play at my feet.
"Thank you, Whitney," I said. "I'll think about it."
Then the doorbell rang.
My mother said, "Oh, that must be the Hendersons. I invited them last minute."
I turned around.
The woman standing on the porch was holding a casserole dish and a folder. I knew the folder. It was the tan HHS interagency folder with the blue tab in the corner. I had signed her name on a memo six weeks ago.
She saw me before my mother did.
She said, "Dr. Alderman? What are you doing here?"
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