Christine Walker Facebook ad: “Same Chip As $5,000 Clinic Aids - For $149”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

1622532182188683

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads

Relaunches

0

How we count

Ad text

Two phones face-down on a diner table. Mine on the left. My daughter Rebecca's on the right. A booth at a Denny's in Modesto on a Sunday in October 2023. The plates between us. Her omelet. My hash and eggs. Half eaten. Two coffee cups. No talk. She had set her phone face-down 28 minutes back when we sat down. I had set mine face-down a minute after. We are both phone-down people. We have been since she was 11. The phones were not the problem. The problem was the eight-foot gap between us across a four-foot booth that I had no way to close. Because I could not hear her. Rebecca is 41. She is my only daughter. She is a labor-and-delivery nurse at a hospital in Sacramento. She had driven 90 minutes down the 99 to take me to breakfast that Sunday. I had not picked up her phone calls in five weeks. She said on the voicemail she finally left me, "Mom. I am starting to think I did something." She had not done anything. I had stopped picking up. I could not crack her voice on a cell call any more. I had not told her. I had not told a soul. I had just stopped picking up. I am 68. I'm Christine Walker, and I run this page for the parents and grown children eating in silence across a diner booth. Jean wrote this — a mother who sat through twenty-eight wordless minutes across from her daughter Rebecca at a Denny's. She asked me to share her letter exactly as she wrote it. Here she is. I am Jean. I am a retired almond-grower from Stanislaus County. I ran 80 acres of almonds for 37 years. I raised Rebecca and her older brother Tom in a farmhouse two miles outside Hughson. My husband Ray died of pancreatic cancer in 2021. I have been a widow for three years. I have been a woman losing her hearing for five. The Denny's booth on that Sunday morning was the closest I had come to telling Rebecca what was wrong. I had not been able to do it. She asked three questions in the first 20 minutes. The first was about the orchard. Was I keeping it leased to the same man. I gave her a one-line answer. The second was about Tom in Bakersfield. Had I heard from him about Christmas. I said yes and gave her one line. The third was a longer ask about her son Cole, my eight-year-old grandson. Cole had started second grade. The school was, she said, "starting to suggest something." I heard the words "Cole" and "reading" and "second grade." I did not hear the rest. I said, "That's something." She blinked once. The same blink my granddaughter Emma had given at the Thanksgiving table six months later. The blink that meant Grandma just filed herself away. The next 28 minutes neither of us said a word. We ate. We drank coffee. She paid the check. She walked me to my truck in the parking lot and she hugged me and she said, "Mom. I love you. I do not know what is going on but I am going to find out." I drove home. I sat at my kitchen table. I cried for the second time since Ray's funeral. I refused to let my father's silence become mine. My father, Don, was an almond-grower before me on the same 80 acres. He went deaf in stages between 1986 and 1993. He turned down every hearing-aid appointment my mother set up. He died in a nursing home in Modesto in 1999 at the age of 76. He had not held a real chat with my mother in seven years. At his funeral my mother held my hand in the parking lot. She said, "Jeanie. He was gone a long time before he was gone." I was 43. I made a promise on that asphalt. What had taken my father in stages would not take me. For 24 years I kept the promise without thinking about it. Then in 2019 my hearing started to slip. By the Denny's breakfast in October 2023 I was, by my own quiet count, in year three of my father's path. I tried to fix it the week after the Denny's breakfast. I bought a $42 amp off a TV-shopping show. I wore it to the almond co-op meeting in November. It blasted the HVAC vent over my head so loud I pulled it out before the second item on the agenda. I sent it back in seven days. The seller kept $11. I drove to Costco Hearing in Modesto in November 2023. A 43-minute visit with a pleasant young man. The quote was $1,499 per ear plus six follow-up visits in Manteca, 28 miles round-trip. Three thousand dollars and most of my late fall. I told him I would think about it. I went to Miracle-Ear in the strip mall on Sisk Road in December. A 56-minute "lifestyle hearing review." A printout for $4,890 mid-tier or $6,490 top-tier. A CareCredit form at 26.99 percent. I folded the printout into quarters in the parking lot. I went to the Phonak clinic in Modesto in January 2024. A real audiologist. Doctorate on the wall. The hearing test took an hour. The quote was $5,498 for the pair plus $400 for the "premium fitting" plus $250 a year for the continued-care plan. I sat in the parking lot for 33 minutes. I drove home. I did not tell Rebecca. I bought a $79 pair of Walmart OTC aids in January. The fit was wrong. The right ear sat at a slope. It whistled at any setting above three. I sent them back in 14 days. The store kept $15. I bought a $189 Amazon pro set. They were too big for my canal. They fell out at the orchard fence one Tuesday. I lost the left one in the gravel. I never found it. I had to mail back a broken set. I bought a $329 Bluetooth pair from a late-night cable ad. They paired to my phone. They did not pick up Rebecca on the same phone. I put them in the kitchen drawer in week two. I bought a $59 sound amp off Amazon. It came with no English manual. The left ear died on day three. I gave up on the return. Eight failed tries. Six lost weekends. Twelve hundred dollars sunk. No sound back. In February 2024 Rebecca drove down again. Not for breakfast. She showed up at the farmhouse at 9 AM on a Saturday with a printout from a research piece about hearing loss and the brain. A friend at her hospital had emailed it to her. She set it on my kitchen table. She said, "Mom. I read this. I am a labor nurse, not an ear doctor, but I am not dumb. You have a hearing problem. We are going to do something about it today." I told her every thing. The Costco quote. The Miracle-Ear printout. The Phonak quote. The cable-ad pair in the drawer. I told her about the parking lots. I told her about my father. I cried again. She made one phone call. To her older brother Tom in Bakersfield. Tom is 44. He is an oil-field machinist. He had been wearing hearing aids for two years that I had not noticed. The device was a 9-gram in-canal unit. Tom was my son. I had not been looking. Tom drove up from Bakersfield the next Saturday. He sat at the kitchen table with Rebecca and Ray's empty chair between them. He set a small leather case on the table. ClearSound Restore. 9 grams per side. Direct-Audio Bypass. Tom told me the way a Bakersfield machinist tells you about a tolerance spec. Stock hearing aids amp up the whole room. They make the noise louder along with the voice. They push the louder noise into the same dead hair-cell path that is already broken on the high notes. The s, sh, t, f, th sounds that carry the words. The dead cells hand back louder mud. The patient hears louder muffled. Direct-Audio Bypass does not amp up the room. It re-routes the high-note sound into the nearby bands the ear still reads clean. The brain re-maps in seven to ten days. The s comes back. The t comes back. The words come back. This is not new science. The brain-science work that backs Direct-Audio Bypass dates to the late 1990s. UC San Francisco. Cochlear-implant work used the same trick on deep-loss patients for 15 years. What is new is the build. A 9-gram in-canal shell. What is also new is the way it ships. The $9.4 billion a year hearing-aid trade — Phonak, Oticon, Miracle-Ear, Costco Hearing — has built its margin on the audiologist visit, the fitting, the wax-mold charge, the six-week cycle. The yearly care plan. The $9.4 billion does not buy better sound. It buys real-estate leases on Sisk Road and Monroe Street and a strip mall by a Walgreens. ClearSound Restore ships direct. Rebecca ordered the pair on her phone at the kitchen table while Tom and I talked. $149.99 a pair plus shipping. 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee. 2-Year FREE Replacement Warranty. The box arrived on Wednesday. Day 1 I put them in. They sat in my canal with no fitting fee. I heard the air conditioner hum I had not heard in two years. I heard Ray's wind chime on the porch I had stopped going out to. Day 3 I sat on the front porch and I called my old friend Jim Vasquez who had retired down to Visalia in 2022. We had not spoken in eight months. Forty-one minutes. He said at the end, "Jean. You sound like Jean." Day 5 Rebecca called me from her car on her way home from a birth in Sacramento. The cell call I had not been able to crack for two years. We talked for 41 minutes. She told me about Cole's reading tutor. I caught every word. I asked three follow-up questions. She started to cry first. Day 11 my son Tom called me from Bakersfield. We had not held a real phone call in three years. We talked for an hour about his new shop. I caught every word. Day 19 I drove to Sacramento to take Rebecca to breakfast for a change. We sat at a busy IHOP on Bradshaw Road. Both phones face-down. Talk across the table for an hour and 40 minutes. She told me every thing she had been wanting to tell me since Ray died. Every chat we had had since 2021 had been a guessing game. Day 26 I went to the almond co-op meeting in Hughson. I sat through the full agenda. I asked a question on item four about the irrigation rate. The chair answered me. I caught his answer. I did not have to ask twice. Day 41 I took Cole to a Sacramento Kings game. The arena was loud the way only an NBA arena is loud. I sat next to him for two and a half hours. We held a chat about basketball and his reading tutor and his school. I caught every word. Day 67 I drove out to Visalia to see Jim Vasquez for the first time in three years. We sat at his kitchen table for four hours. We ate his wife Rosa's chicken and rice. Rosa told a long story about her sister in Fresno. I caught every word of it. We told the same stories we had told for 40 years. The one about the 1976 frost. The one about the well that ran dry in 1988. I heard every line. I laughed in the right places. I had not laughed in the right places in three years. Day 81 we had Thanksgiving at the farmhouse. Eleven people at the dining-room table where Ray used to sit at the head. I sat at the foot. I held a chat with every person at that table at some point during the meal. I heard Cole tell a joke from the far end. I heard Tom argue with his cousin about a truck. The first time since 2019 that any version of me sat at the foot of that table and was real with the people there. I refused to let my father's silence become mine. I refused to let my father's silence become mine. I am writing this for the parent. The parent on one side of a diner table with a grown child on the other. Two phones face-down. An eight-foot gap across a four-foot booth. The grown child looking at you the way Rebecca looked at me in October 2023. You have not done anything wrong. You have stopped picking up the phone because you can not crack the cell call any more. You have started saying "That's something" because you can not hear the real sentence. You have been fading in stages and your daughter has noticed. You are not dumb for any of it. Your ears aren't broken. The signal path is. And the path can be re-routed. The 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee is a real 90 days. The 2-Year FREE Replacement Warranty replaces the device for any failure inside two years. There is no fitting fee. There is no care plan. There is no CareCredit form at 26.99 percent. The pair ships to your kitchen counter. The Big Four — Phonak, Oticon, Miracle-Ear, Costco Hearing — can not match the 90-day window. They have already paid out the strip-mall lease and the audiologist take-home. They can not refund the $5,498 on day 89. The chain is the price. ClearSound Restore broke the chain. A Word About The Price Tag I want to be plain about this. $149.99 a pair. Plus a small shipping charge. With a 90-day window that pays you back if it does not work. With a two-year free warranty if the device breaks. The Phonak quote was $5,498 for the pair plus $400 for the fitting plus $250 a year for the care plan. That is $6,148 on day one. Plus $250 a year on top. $6,148 against $149.99. That is the math the chain has been hiding for 30 years. Tap below. Read the page. Order the pair. Pick up the next call your daughter places. P.S. — Rebecca took me to breakfast last Sunday at the same Denny's in Modesto. The booth where the two-phones-face-down photo would have been taken if either of us had thought to take it in October 2023. We sat in the same booth. Both phones face-down. Talk from the first cup of coffee to the third. She told me about a new family she had brought home from the hospital, a hard birth with a happy end. I caught every word. When she walked me to my truck in the parking lot she hugged me harder than she had in three years. She said, "Mom. Welcome back. I missed you." I did not cry until I had pulled out of the parking lot. I cried for the third time since Ray's funeral. Three good cries in five years. Two of them since the box came on the Wednesday in February. There is a name for what it does: Direct-Audio Bypass. The consonants get a new route, and the brain learns it fast. → https://stamiri.com/products/clearsound-restore-hearing-aids

Where the ad sends people

stamiri.com

Same Chip As $5,000 Clinic Aids - For $149

Stamiri