I'm a very hearing-oriented person. I'm
bad at recognizing faces but I do recognize voices, sometimes years after
hearing them and only hearing them for a second or so. I don't have a TV, and as
a dyslexic reading is hard, but I have the radio on all the time. I started to
cry.
Dr. P asked me I felt that losing my
hearing would stigmatize me. No, I said. It's not that. I'm not afraid of
stigma. After all, because of my ear disorder, which destroyed my balance, I
walk with a cane, and have for most of my life. I'm already stigmatized. It's
just that hearing is so important to me.
I told Dr. P a family story. My Slovak
grandmother, a peasant woman, lost her firstborn, Mary, in the influenza
pandemic of 1918. I think of Mary as my spirit aunt.
My grandmother prayed hard to conceive
again, and to have a healthy child. She prayed to Saint Joseph, Jesus' adoptive
father. Of course my grandmother named her second born child
"Joseph."
But then disease struck Joseph, too.
He was very, very ill. The doctor told
my grandmother to give up on him. He was a goner. Just cut the cord. Write him
off. We can't do anything for him.
I think of her in that house, which I
did enter when we visited Slovakia over fifty years later. A house my
grandfather built my hand. Very simple, stark, small, basic. No electricity, no
running water. A woman alone watching her second baby die.
But my grandmother rejected the doctor's
advice. She prayed hard for Joseph. And
he lived. But he was deaf.
When my grandmother, my mother, and my
uncle Joe emigrated to America -- my grandfather was already here, working the
coal mines -- life was hard. My mother told me about foraging for food in a
garbage dump. My grandfather had emphysema from the mines and couldn't work.
Someone had to work to feed the family.
My grandmother had four more kids after reuniting with her husband. She had to
take care of the kids, and grandpa.
She sent my mother out to work as a
nanny and domestic servant. My mother, a very smart woman, never got to go to
school in America, and she was doomed, without any school diplomas, to doing
domestic and factory work for the rest of her life.
It was very different for my Uncle Joe.
Because he was deaf, he qualified for various charities. He attended a special
school, learned a skilled trade, and became much more economically comfortable
than my mother would ever be.
In short, I said to Dr. P, being deaf
was a surprise benefit to my Uncle Joe.
Dr P looked thoughtful.
He reached up and removed a hearing aid
from his ear. I had never noticed this before.
When his mother was pregnant with him,
she had rubella, aka German measles.
Doctors told her to abort the fetus
growing inside her. Birth defects would
be inevitable.
She was, Dr. P. said, a religious
person, and she declined to have the abortion.
Dr. P. was born hard of hearing. He had
to attend special classes and he was mercilessly teased. He imitated how other
kids would make fun of him, using the voice that people who are hard of hearing
from birth speak with. I was astounded. He captured that voice perfectly.
It wasn't till he was older that he got
his first hearing aids, and that changed his life. He went to medical school.
One day, he was home alone with his mom,
and she had a medical emergency. She was dying. By chance, Dr. P. was there,
and he performed the necessary procedure to save her life.
His mother later said to him, "They
told me to end your life, and I did not, and here you saved my life. Had you
not been here, I would have died."
Dr. P. looked very thoughtful and said
to me "I don't normally share that story with people."
Two stories about things not turning out
as one might have thought.
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