DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING

SUCCESS STORY

Nancy Blose:TAKING CONTROL OF LIFE WITH DRAGON

On June 22, 1997, Nancy Blose’s life literally turned upside down when her Jeep flipped five times and she was left with a broken neck. She recalls: “I was a 34-year-old mother of two, a wife, a sister, a daughter, now trapped in a broken body. I was dependent on others for all my daily requirements.”

Then she discovered Dragon NaturallySpeaking. “I desperately wanted control of my life,” she says, “and I found it with my voice and Dragon. There is permanency with written words, and I had many thoughts I wanted preserved.”

With the help of Dragon, Blose was able to write letters to her children, then ages six and eight, that would be opened on their 16th birthdays. She says: “The letters were my assurance, in case of my early demise, to once again tell my children how much I love them and to pass on motherly pearls of wisdom. Thankfully, I was able to hand deliver their birthday letters.”

Dragon also enabled Blose to help out in her daughter’s third grade class. “The students would write short stories twice a year,” she recalls, “and the teacher needed them typed up. I was able to easily do that with Dragon.” Later, she used Dragon to keep track of her children’s high school academics and communicate with their teachers via e-mail, which she says “made for a happy mom but not-so-happy teenagers.”

An Integral Part of Day-to-Day Life During the years since the accident, Dragon has been an integral part of Blose’s life. She has lived in four different places, traveled all over the United States, and even gone river rafting, bowling, and skiing, as well as taken a ride in a hot air balloon and experienced a six-hour personal encounter with a whale. A self-described “OCD organizer,” Dragon played a key role in planning those adventures. She also used Dragon to compile a cookbook of family favorite recipes.

Blose stays in touch with friends and family via email and Facebook, and she uses Hallmark’s web site to add personal messages and pictures to greeting cards that the company mails on her behalf. “People are shocked when they receive my cards,” she says. Her children are now in college, but she still remains in regular contact with them thanks to Dragon.

Dragon even lets her manage a small business, Thrive Control Gardening (thrivegardening.com), which sells a controller that monitors light, temperature, and CO2 levels in an indoor garden. She dictates her bookkeeping numbers into Quicken, handles her taxes with Turbo Tax, and uses spreadsheets to keep track of tax deductions and take care of accounts receivables.

“I have been a Dragon user since its infancy,” Blose recalls. “My life has been

challenging, but Dragon gives me the tools to help meet those challenges.”

1 Wa y s i d e R o a d • B u r l i n g t o n , M A 0 1 8 0 3 • w w w. n u a n c e . c o m /d r a g o n