Down and Dirty: VA staff dig deep to assist local Veteran

That’s what happened to Army Veteran Michael Glueck recently when he inadvertently threw away one of his brand new hearing aids when it got caught on his Covid mask.

“I was a nervous wreck,” says Glueck, who had been visiting the Cape Girardeau VA Health Care Center for an outdoor event one afternoon. “I had just gotten the things like two weeks before, and I wasn’t used to them. I was wearing my mask, and I took it off outside and didn’t realize one of them had hooked onto the string and got thrown in the trash can.”

At first, Glueck didn’t notice the hearing aid was gone, and he went on to work in Jackson, Mo.

“It was a good hour or so before I realized what had happened. I went out looking for them everywhere,” he says, admitting he was panicking at the situation.

“I backtracked all the way back to the thing at Cape and realized I was outside when I took my mask off. But, I checked the trash can and they had already emptied it,” he recalls.

By then, the event had ended and the day was winding down, with much of the staff already having gone home. However, Glueck enlisted the help of a pair of housekeepers, and they went to work looking in the outside trash dumpster.

“I noticed there was a pickup out there and a couple of our housekeepers were standing there, so I walked over to see what was going on,” recalls evening-shift lead housekeeping aide Chuck Schiwitz. “Housekeepers Angela Osborn and Minnie Hillman explained to me that this gentleman had lost his hearing aid, he thought, in the trash when it got tangled up in his mask.”

As the team quickly began to search through the trash for the missing hearing aid, Glueck mentioned he knew it had to be there because it had Bluetooth technology.

“When he told me that, it gave me an idea. I went and got Trent (audiologist Trent Essner) and told him what was going on,” Schiwitz explains.

Essner, in turn, came out to help by using the Veteran’s cellphone to isolate the bag the hearing aid might be in.

A few at a time, bags were placed onto carts and wheeled away from the dumpster in a process of elimination.

And then something happened — the signal was lost. Surely the missing hearing aid had to be in one of the bags just removed.

“We lost signal on a particular bag of trash, so we opened it up a piece at a time and went through the entire bag,” Schiwitz says.

Within a short time, Glueck looked down and shouted, ‘There it is,” and grabbed it out of the bag.

“It was complete relief” he says of finding the lost hearing aid. “Those things had been life changers.”

The team had pulled together and accomplished the unusual job at hand.

“I cannot literally say enough about this team and how they did not even pause to jump in and help,” saysLibby Johnson, health system administrator, of her staff.

“It was awesome, and I can’t say enough good things about them,” Glueck says enthusiastically, speaking of those who helped him.

“It was wonderful,” Essner says of the entire episode. “Housekeeping got their elbows dirty and got in there to help the Veteran find his hearing aid, and they had the wherewithal to think about coming to get me to assist.

“It was a neat situation that I thought was pretty hopeless at first. We had a mountain of trash, and I thought, ‘there’s no way … it was a needle in a haystack.’”

For Schiwitz, a Navy Veteran himself, it was an “awesome feeling” to be able to help a Veteran that day. “That’s ultimately what we’re here for, above and beyond the scope of our work each day, to serve Veterans,” he says. “This guy had come from wherever to enjoy the day, so I wasn’t going to let this be an unenjoyable memory for him.”

And, Schiwitz says, he and his coworkers would absolutely jump right in again.

“Afterward, we talked about what true teamwork is and how it came together really quick,” he says. “It might seem trivial, but it was one of those experiences that you can’t buy. Of course we’d do it all over again.”