Strangers asked Lay-Flurrie how she’d been injured. When Gerry came along, everyone saw the canes. In time, Lay-Flurrie accepted and then celebrated the disability, though some colleagues still didn’t know she had one. Of course, that made workdays exhausting. Video captioning at work was not yet a thing.īut her perfect diction and exceptional lip-reading skills – honed by practicing in the mirror as a little girl – allowed her to cloak the deafness. So, no hearing aids, no sign language interpreters.
Back then, she feared it would define her. On that level, the clot had shoved Lay-Flurrie into a somewhat different reality.Įarly in her career, until about age 30, she purposely hid her severe, ever-increasing hearing loss, originally caused by childhood measles and multiple ear infections. More than 1 billion people live with disabilities and about 70% of those are not immediately apparent, such as deafness. Microsoft’s chief accessibility officer – a tech exec who is profoundly deaf – now had a visible disability.
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her “trusty steeds,” dubbing them “Michael” and “Rosie.” She derided Gerry as “stubborn, sneaky and attention seeking” but soon reported that “Gerry and I have figured out how to cohabitate.” She called it “Gerry.” Then she named her canes, a.k.a. Yet to the surprise of no one in her life, Lay-Flurrie found both whimsy and wisdom in the harrowing episode.įirst the humor. More than a year later, she still needed her two canes on some days.
After leaving the hospital, she relied on two canes to walk. But the embolism caused long-term leg damage. Surgeons successfully reduced the clot’s size. “I never expected, at my age, to hear a message from doctors: ‘You may not live through this,’” she recalls. Jenny Lay-Flurrie with her husband Tom McCleery. That day in March 2019, Lay-Flurrie was admitted to the intensive care unit. A previously undetected anatomical defect was the cause. Within an hour, doctors had their diagnosis: A 2-foot-long blood clot snaked from her foot to her stomach, reaching perilously close to her lungs. Tom’s insistence saved her life, she would say later. So, despite the packed bag in her car and the pressing mission on her mind, she grudgingly agreed when her husband, Tom, suggested that they pause their drive to the Seattle airport and instead visit a nearby emergency room. The mysterious pain, which had erupted 24 hours earlier, was only growing. She had a flight to catch, an accessibility conference to attend in California, and more people to enlist in her journey to build a more inclusive world.īut Jenny Lay-Flurrie’s left leg was positively throbbing. She did not want to stop at the hospital. Stories from inside Microsoft’s journey to design a more accessible world