Seeds of Disquiet: One Deaf Woman’s Experience

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----t3I turned to myoId friends, books, for answers. I didn't always find my answers, but the books helped me to ask the right questions. As I studied the library's meager collection of books about deafness, I began to realize that I was not a stupid person. Actually , I discovered, I was a dam good survivor. In high school I had compared myself to the kids around me. Even though my grades were high, I seemed to have to work much harder for them. I had never really understood that the other kids with good hearing had access to so much more information. Glenna, Tom, Denny, and John had been able to use the phone and feel more comfortable with hearing people because they heard sound much better than [did. I hadn't known that hearing aid users could be so different in their ability to make sense of what they heard. I thought hearing aids were like eyeglasses and everyone's hearing got corrected to the same level. Instead, I found there was no such thing as "20/20 hearing." Hearing aids couldn't give us perfect hearing again. I learned that there were different kinds of hearing loss. Nerve or sensorineural loss, which I had, was very different from conductive hearing loss. Turning up the volume on my 87 Seeds of Disquiet hearing aid made the sound louder, not clearer. What I heard was little more than amplified gibberish. Fred was as baffled by the intricacies of hearing loss as I was. He couldn't understand why, after my strokes, I couldn't just switch my hearing aid from my now-dead ear to the stillfunctioning one and pick up where I left off. I was monumentally depressed, but I had always been a fighter and I wasn't willing to give up without one more battle. So I signed up for speech therapy at the local Easter Seals office . I was also becoming more curious about sign language. I wanted to learn it to see what the "deaf world" I was reading about was really like. I looked for a sign language teacher and eventually met a woman new to the area who knew signs. She was willing to teach a class. I helped get it set up at the community college so I could take it. That first class in sign language was really comical. I was by far the worst student. The teacher and all the other students were hearing. I struggled to speechread them for over an hour, and picked up twenty or thirty signs that I could go home and teach to Fred in less than ten minutes. But it was fun anyway, and through the class I made a wonderful new friend, Tootie Campbell. Quite by accident, I discovered that sign language was good for my speech. Bob Franz, my speech therapist, told me that I paced my speech much better and made sounds more distinctly when I talked while signing. In 1979, shortly after I started learning sign language, I read in a newspaper announcement that Fred Yates would be in town to speak to the Lions Club. Fred was the director of the Virginia Council for the Deaf, a state agency. Until I saw the newspaper article, I didn't even know that such an agency existed. I received permission from my supervisor to leave work to attend the speech. I also asked my sign language teacher, Cheryl Reames, to go with me. After his presentation to the 88 Seeds of Disquiet Lions, I introduced myself to Yates. In a real-life comedy of errors, because Cheryl Reames could sign and I could not, he thought that she was deaf and I was hearing. I was delighted when Yates accepted my invitation to return with me to the library. He and I scrawled notes to each other at a table in the children's room until my arm ached. I was starved for information about deafness, and he was the first deaf professional I'd met. He recognized my need for answers and generously provided them. With Yates' encouragement and guidance, I began to understand how deafness had shaped my life. About two months later, Yates asked me to attend a regional conference on mental health and deafness. There, I discussed weighty issues and pressing needs with a few deaf persons and a lot of hearing professionals...