Reflections: My Life in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I AM INDEBTED to many people who have offered their support, insights, expertise, and constructive criticisms at many stages during the course of this project. First and foremost, my wife Arlene read the entire manuscript, offered countless suggestions and clarifications, and encouraged me to keep writing even when I often wondered if my experiences could possibly be of any interest to anyone outside my immediate family (and, sometimes, even to them). She assured me that other deaf and hard of hearing people, as well as their friends and those in their immediate families, could learn something useful and important from reading about the challenges our family has faced, and how we have dealt with them. I hope she is right. (She usually is, as I’ve learned over the years.) My three children, Erik, Anders (Andy), and Amanda, also read the entire manuscript and offered many helpful comments and suggestions . Some of them were a bit painful for me to acknowledge, but, like Arlene, they are no doubt on target in their assessments (most of the time, anyway). I want to particularly thank Erik and Amanda for writing two of the short “sidebars” that are included in the book. Erik also suggested a way to make the chapter on the 2006 at Gallaudet fit more logically into the book’s overall theme. Both Erik and his wife, Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, recently minted PhDs, also made a number of helpful editorial and more substantive suggestions. The support, assistance, and love from all of them are gratefully acknowledged. I’m 227 228 Reflections very fortunate to have such a wonderful family, and whatever merit this book has is due in no small measure to them. In addition to my family, I have benefited enormously from extremely thoughtful comments from some of my colleagues, most of whom I have known and or worked with for a decade or more. Dr. Morrison (Morri) Wong, professor of sociology at Texas Christian University, and I first met as graduate students at the University of California, Riverside, in fall 1973. Over the past four decades, we have read and commented on each other’s work, played many sets of tennis (until I stopped playing and moved on to cycling as my sport of preference—if I’ve done the math right, at the time I stopped playing tennis we had both won exactly half the sets we played against each other), and have often gotten together at various sociological conferences, typically with Arlene and Morri’s wife, Janet. Morri provided a number of insightful comments on the first chapter (the only one I asked him to read). I have enjoyed a very productive professional relationship with Dr. Irene Leigh, a clinical psychologist at Gallaudet, for more than a decade, as we have written a number of articles and chapters, as well as a book about cochlear implants, together. We have also made many joint presentations . We have often read and commented on each other’s papers and books (that we didn’t write together), and I have benefited immensely from her wisdom and psychologically oriented insights and observations. Irene read and commented on all three chapters. I should note that Irene has some misgivings about the inclusion of chapter III in this volume, especially since it is quite different from the first two chapters. I hope she agrees that the third chapter, extensively rewritten from the version she reviewed, makes a useful contribution to the book. Dr. Margaret Weigers Vitullo, who was my colleague in the Sociology Department at Gallaudet for many years, also read the entire manuscript and offered an incredible array of thoughtful and pertinent observations and suggestions. I suspect that the revisions I made after reading and thinking about all of her comments are probably not as extensive as she might have preferred, but this in no way detracts from the scope and My Experiences as a Cochlear Implans User 229 thoughtfulness of the comments she wrote on virtually every page of the manuscript. Margaret left Gallaudet University in 2007 and is currently the director of the American Sociological Association’s Academic and Professional Affairs Program. Jennifer Yeagle, my long-time cochlear implant audiologist at the Listening Center at Johns Hopkins University, read and offered many suggestions for the second chapter (the only chapter she read). Since I am not an audiologist, I was particularly dependent on her for making sure...