Damron, Andrew
Gaylene Croker
English R101 11:30-12:20
9/11/2012
The
Happy Silence
For many years I always thought that people
just stopped talking in the middle of their sentences, but that was not even
close to what was actually happening. This all started back when I was in the
third grade. I had a teacher who noticed that I continued to miss things that
all the other students were getting. Not to say that I was a dumb student or
anything, but I clearly was not hearing all the things the teacher was saying.
So one day after class had let out for recess he told me to stay back, that he
wanted to see something real quick. He talked to me for about five minutes and
in that time he had already realized that I was partially deaf. He recommended
I go to the nurse of the school to actually see if there was any proof to this
but she was unable to tell, seeing as she was a school nurse. So the school
then recommended that I go to a specialist. After going and running some tests,
the doctor said that I suffered from severe hearing lost in both ears; the
doctors weren’t sure as to how much I had lost but I did clearly miss some
things. The doctors also then said I suffer from something called tendentious,
which basically means I hear loud ringing noises in my ears at random times.
This is usually a result of a traumatic sound damage, such as that of a bomb or
an explosion of some sort.
One of the things that I had
soon come to realize after discovering that I was deaf, was that I also had an
incredibly bad speech impediment, and it was painfully obvious to others but I
guess they were just too kind or something to even ask why I was saying words
wrong. So now all of a sudden I had just discovered that I was not only deaf
but I also had a bad speech impediment. I thought to myself well things can’t
get much worse. Oh how wrong I was. After discovering that I had these things
wrong with me, the school also found out that I had a stigmatism in my right
eye. So I had the trifecta of things that could go wrong, I was hearing
impaired, my vision was impaired, and my speech was impaired.
Well things had to change and I
had to come to terms with the fact that all these changes were going to be
extremely weird. The first thing I had to get was glasses; now I’m not saying
that wearing glasses makes life hard or something but the school I was in
didn’t really have any kids wearing glasses. Basically the only other people
wearing glasses at the school were the nurse and I. So wearing glasses led to
some of the less looked back upon days of my elementary school life. After a
while I got used to the glasses and so did everyone else, but then my family
had to move to Hawaii because my father was in the military. When we got there,
the doctor told my parents that if I could get something like a trampoline, it
would really improve my sight. When I heard that, the first thought came to
mind was “Mother of God, where have you been all this time?” So with the
doctor’s recommendation my parents went out and got me a trampoline. It turns
out that the doctor was right and the trampoline did in fact help and fully
correct my stigmatism, but the correction wouldn’t happen overnight, the whole
thing took about six months to fully correct my impairment to the point where I
didn’t need to wear glasses anymore. The way it helped was that my eye, like
everyone else’s tries to lock onto everything around us. While on a trampoline
your eyes can’t lock onto everything around you because you are jumping up and
down rapidly. This causes your eyes to focus in and become stronger as they try
to lock in on the moving environment around them.
The most complicated change and
weirdest was the change to my hearing. Now, my family isn’t rich or anything
like that, but when it came to my hearing my parents put forth a pretty penny.
I had gotten a pair of hearing aids that cost about six thousand dollars. This,
of course, was mainly covered by our insurance but still, trusting a fourth
grader at this point with a pair of six thousand dollar hearing aids is a
little scary, at least for me. The first step and one of the most awkward parts
of getting these hearing aids, was the molding. Basically this was one of the
worst events that have ever taken place in my ear. The doctor came in and just
packs molding clay into my ear for about ten minutes it was him messing with my
ears to get the clay down in there. Then on top of that I had to hold the clay
in place by tilting my ear to whatever side he was working on. If you have ever
had to have something put in your ear for even, say, five minutes, it’s already
annoying, well I had to sit there head tilted for about half an hour per ear.
This was possibly one of the worst days in my life to date. So after getting
the molding for the hearing aids the doctor said it was going to be about two
weeks until I finally got them. So my mom, being the caring mother she was,
signed me up for speech therapy. The first session started before I had
received my hearing aids, so I was somewhat on my own for trying to pick up
what the therapist was saying. But after finally the teacher had told me what I
was saying wrong I was easily able to correct it myself without the hearing
aids.
But finally the day the
hearing aids arrived; I was so excited. So many thoughts were running through
my head; for a little bit I kind of thought that they were going to make me
into a super hero, giving me like super hearing to hear things over miles away.
Sadly, they did not give such powers but none-the-less I was not deterred. It
was the first time I was going to wear the hearing aids to school and basically
the first time I was going to find out what all I had been missing out on my whole
life. The anticipation was over-whelming, I started to breath kind of heavily;
I was sweating profusely. I remember seeing this tiny little bird with a scared
wing hoping, by but then suddenly he took off and was flying as if he had never
suffered any damage to his wing. I felt as if that bird was a sign that I was
going to be okay, so I walked into class. I figured that I was just going to
pick up on a few new things and life would be the same. My goodness how wrong I
was. First off, everything sounded like it was coming through a microphone,
which basically amplified all the noises around me. I assumed that the hearing
aids were going to make things louder than, just not as intense as it was. The
next thing was, I heard literally everything in the class. I heard the teacher,
the kids in the back, and the ones in the front, I even heard the kids playing
outside. All of this was just so overwhelming to me. I felt as if everyone had
just gotten really close to my ears and started to do what they did every day.
I began to feel Closter phobic; everything was just so crazy that I went from
hearing some things and being fine, to hearing way too many things at the same
time for my mind to even being to process. I ran out of the class room gasping
for air. The feeling being suffocated by sound is one that I will never forget.
It’s something I wouldn’t wish onto anyone in the world. I felt as if I had no
way out, like I was surrounded by this set of invisible hands that were just
choking the life out of me. I took out the hearing aids and I just sat there. I
took in the tranquility of the silence I had come to love.
At that moment I realized
though, I needed to be able to cope with all of this, that I needed to overcome
this fear of sound. I put the hearing aids back in and just began to tell
myself over and over again that everything was going to be okay, that I’m not
going to be choked out by the sounds of other people. I walked back into the
class during break and I told the teacher what had happened. She sat me down
and comforted me, basically telling me that it was going to be overwhelming at
first and that it would be okay after I got used to all these new noises. And
to my surprise she was right. Though it took a few months for me to finally
accept all these new noises and become accustomed to them, I none-the-less did
so.
Now as I said earlier,
trusting a fourth grader with hearing aids was a scary thing. There was a
terrible storm that was hitting the island and we still had to go to school
even though it was flooding and there was water all in the hallways. (It was an
outdoor school.) The hearing aids were water sensitive, so in the rain I had to
wear a hoodie and have an umbrella to cover them up while I was wearing them,
or I could put them in my container which was airtight and waterproof. With me being a brilliant fourth grader, I
had forgotten my container at home and only had a hoodie with me. I had to go
to the bathroom so I made the god awful mistake of putting them in my sweater
pocket. Walking down the flooded hallway there wasn’t a lot of space for more
than one person let alone a whole class walking by, so naturally I got bumped
into. Now, what I didn’t realize is that the hearing aids had gotten knocked
out of my pocket and I never saw them again. So when I got home I told my
mother, who had the fury of a thousand suns burning in her, and she yelled at
me for a few hours and lectured me on how expensive they were and what not. But
the entire time she was yelling all I could think of, what life was going to be
like now that I wasn’t going to be able to hear some things again.
Naturally my mother
tried to replace them with a different and less expensive system, but it didn’t
work. I had to adapt to the fact that I was going to miss out on things. So I
learned on my own to read lips. I’m not an expert or anything but I can do
enough to get by when I miss a few things. And if I get really overwhelmed and
end up missing a lot of things I just simply ask the person to repeat
themselves, or if it’s someone speaking to a crowd I use something called
connecting the context. It’s basically where I use what they said before and
what their saying now and try to remember their lips to what I missed and
create the word or sentences I missed. But majority of the time I’m able to
just read lips and just continue the conversation. What this event in my life
made me realize is that even though I don’t hear everything around me, I’m
lucky. I have the privilege of not having to hear all the sounds of people
fidgeting and coughing and all the other little things people do. Truly, I see
myself as a lucky person because I get the tranquility of silence. Something I
find is greatly under treasured by others. The silence although sometimes
interrupted by the tendentious, gives me the peace in my mind to sit and calmly
think about what I need to do or what I should do. With this hearing loss I do
find myself sometimes missing the sounds I once could hear but then I think
back to being surrounded by all those sounds and I find myself just as happy
without them in my life.
