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Delaware Assistive Technology Initiative

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Volume 15, No. 3, Fall 2007

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A Tribute to Joan Bradley

Tracy Bombara
Speech-Language Pathologist

Photo of Joan BradleyJoan Bradley left this world on August 12, 2007. For those of us privileged to know her, she was an inspiration, a constant breath of fresh air and an endless source of energy. She began her nursing career in the Army, serving in the Korean War, and continued to care for so many at Wesley College and Kent General Hospital in Dover. She continued her education at the University of Delaware, becoming an R.N. First Assistant, and spent much of the rest of her career promoting the Association of Operating Room Nurses (AORN) to the point of co-authoring the Core Curriculum for the R.N. First Assistant. She was the dedicated and devoted wife to Walter, the loving mother of five children and the adoring grandmother to ten grandchildren. She was also an accomplished seamstress and a skilled bridge player. Some of her favorite times were when her family gathered at her home on Silver Lake to enjoy boating, water skiing, and tubing, with herself behind the wheel of the boat!

As if these accomplishments were not enough, she achieved so much more after an aneurysm robbed her of the power of speech in 1992. A circuitous journey spanning four years led her across three states to find an augmentative communication device that would allow her to communicate more effectively. She obtained her Delta Talker well into her sixties and worked hard to learn to operate the device and created her own "dictionary" to record her symbol sequences. When Medicare denied funding for the device not once, but three times, she refused to give up and continued the fight to ensure that these types of equipment were made available to people like her who could benefit from their use. She received her reimbursement check from Medicare seven years after she obtained the device. She continued the funding fight because the Delta Talker allowed her to return to many activities that she had lost with the aneurysm rupture, not the least of which was teaching.

Over the course of the past 12 years, Mrs. Bradley was instrumental in educating many people on the benefits and possibilities of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). Upon receiving the Delta Talker, she volunteered as a guest reader at a local preschool program. She was able to give presentations at the LIFE Conference, at Kent General Hospital, and annually at the University of Delaware during the summer class on AAC. She provided testimony on AAC funding at the National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) in Washington D.C. and was always willing to share her story with anyone who was interested.

Personally, Mrs. Bradley was a gift to a speech-language pathologist working in the field of AAC. While I was the "knowledgeable clinician," she was the expert in communicating with a disability. She taught me that assisting people with speech impairments who depended on some type of AAC involved more than providing a means to communicate pleasantries such as "please" and "thank you" or ordering in a restaurant, more than calling to make basic medical appointments or paratransit travel arrangements. She wanted to live independently in her home and needed to be able to call or visit her doctors and tell them from a nursing perspective what her needs were. She wanted to be able to make appointments at her hair salon the day before special occasions and events so she would look her best. She not only wanted to be able to play bridge, but needed the vocabulary to trump her opponents soundly. She wanted to be more than a person in the pew at church: she needed to pray out loud and go to confession. She certainly taught me to think outside of the box with regard to personal vocabulary vs. generic messages with multiple applications that comprise most vocabulary sets on AAC systems. She hammered home the point that HER vocabulary needed to be about HER life. Most importantly, she never gave up on herself or her convictions, even in a funding battle that lasted seven years, for no other reason than it was "the right thing to do."

On behalf of all who were privileged to know her or who were able to learn from her life experience, I thank Mrs. Bradley for the lessons she provided to the AAC world and hope that the bridge tournament in heaven has provided a good share of grand slams!

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