“You know who you are when you surrender pretense. When you stop self-assessing; stuck on past tense; When you realize your life isn’t all that intense, as you think it must be.”

Pleasanton resident Linda Drattell wrote these words in a recently-published anthology of poetry called “Remember This Day,” in which she processes the notion of survival. She has navigated a series of daunting challenges through personal written reflection.

Drattell worked for a while as a financial analyst, and moved from Maryland to Pleasanton in 2000 with her husband and children. But at around the same time, everyone started telling her she needed a hearing aid. At first she shrugged them off.

“As anybody who gradually loses their hearing will tell you, they’re the last to know,” Drattell told Patch in an interview.

A few years in, she accepted that she had experienced severe hearing loss.

“I was devastated at the beginning,” she said. “It started slowly, and then one night, I went to sleep, and Sunday morning, I woke up and lost 30 decibels at once. I woke up and the sounds were all skewed. I could hear people speaking, but it was like they were speaking Russian, or some foreign language I couldn’t understand. I was completely freaked out.”

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