This is about how my mom raised a deaf child and a story between mother and daughter.
I was diagnosed as profoundly deaf when I turned 14 months old. It was the late 80's and the ENT specialist told my mom, that I was the deafest person (according to my brainstem audiogram) to be diagnosed. According to doctors and experts, I would never talk. I had a hearing loss of 145 decibels, which means that a Boeing 747 could land behind me, and I would not notice! My mother, Annemarie, resigned from her job as a music teacher and enrolled in a course in Audiology, to reach a language to express myself. Deaf people are immensely frustrated because they have no names for their emotions. My mom used a mirror to show me my anger, happiness, fear, love, etc and taught me words for it these for the first of 4 years of my life, every experience was a language lesson and not an even a picnic or a day at the beach was only an outing, anymore. There were so many words! At this stage, I was wearing Phonak Hearing Swiss which enabled me to hear vowels, but no consonants, amplifie...
Comments
Post a Comment