kylehannah654
New Member
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2016
- Messages
- 3
- Reaction score
- 3
Hi everybody,
I thought it would be nice to share our story as a family. I hope that our experiences can encourage others and bring us closer together as a community.
My wife and I are both pretty typical Americans: raised in a rural area, by conservative God-fearing families that love sports and bbq- and we're all hearing people. My wife and I were married in June of 2008 and by October of that year, I was shipping out to basic training for the US Army. 2 1/2 years later, I returned home after a 1 year deployment to Iraq. Very soon, my wife became pregnant with our first son, Chael.
When the doctors told us he failed his newborn screening, they said it happened all the time, so we didn't think anything of it. Month after month went by, and he continued failing his hearing exams. The "specialists" at the hospital said that he was simply speech delayed and would need to see a speech language pathologist once we got to where we were soon moving to. We moved to Washington state and got a second opinion. After a sedated ABR test, it was confirmed that our baby boy was profoundly deaf. It came as such a shock to us. "We didn't have any deafness in our family" we thought. We immediately felt immensely guilty because our son of over 1 1/2 years was deaf, and we had no idea. Looking back, he was very convincing that he could "hear" things. Talking with the doctors, speech language pathologists and audiologist, we were informed of the options we had. I've come to recognize that there are often two extreme point of views when it comes to reacting to deafness. 1) Often a hearing person who is in a position of "educated authority" will say that there are ways to teach lip reading and equipment to help the deaf person hear, and that will solve the problem. 2) You can also look at it like this: there is no "problem". We've come to realize that plenty of deaf people are fully functioning, intelligent and competent people. We've realized that plenty of deaf people have made great accomplishment in academics, sports and plenty of other things. It's not that we didn't think it was possible, we just didn't know that there was such a thing as an "educational interpreter" that worked with people through college. It was all so new to us, and we slowly started to realize that we had no clue about the deaf community, even though they were right under our nose.
We had heard about cochlear implants, and knew that Chael was a candidate. At the time, it just seemed like the best thing to do. He couldn't make that decision, so we went ahead and got him his first CI and started speech therapy. During this time, we were learning and using sign because we figured even if he did get the implant, at the end of the day, he's still deaf. Our son seemed to catch on to using sign very quickly. I'd say about 2 months or so passed as we slowly learned to use the language ourselves, but suddenly we noticed his use and interest of signs slowed a lot. He soon got to the point where he became very resistant against signs, and would intentionally avoid eye contact. Looking back, we may not have been very considerate of what it was like for him. If I had someone making "loud" facial expressions and waving their hands around at me, I might not want to engage that person, either.
The instructor from an ASL class we had taken agreed to tutor us to teach us more signs and help us get better. She also is an ASL interpreter. Even though Chael wasn't wanting to sign, we thought we'd be the example of communication using sign language and hope to inspire him to do the same. We had "deaf dinners" where we wouldn't speak at all, we'd sign in public anytime Chael was with us. I would sometimes not speak for the first few hours while visiting family to try to get them to understand what it could be like when Chael gets older. We really wanted to do our best as parents to give him a way to communicate, and feel like he was part of the family. Ironically, he only closed off more. The more we signed, the more he seemed to hate it. He went through a period of time where it was nearly impossible to get him to make eye contact with even us! He received a 2nd cochlear, and continued in speech therapy. He seemed to tolerate the implants at first, but never seemed to want them on. Before his 3rd birthday, he had flushed one processor down the toilet, thrown one out the truck window while going down the road, put one in the freezer, and hidden another. We thought we were doing what was best for him, so we kept encouraging him to wear them. He had several issues with the processors before, but the audiologist insisted that the equipment was fine, and that he just needed time to get used to them. December of 2015 was the last time he wore them.
Since then, we have been so fortunate to be able to take our son to an excellent total communication school in Spokane, WA called the "Moose Project". The staff there is nothing short of spectacular and all have ties to the deaf community in many ways. As soon as we met the teachers and director, we knew it was the place for us. Relationships are extremely important to Chael- if you don't spend time with him and get to know him, he won't give you a second glance. His teacher worked a lot to get him to trust her. I believe she has helped to get him to understand that it's ok to use sign to communicate, even if everyone else is talking. Chael was recently moved to Kindergarten because he needed a step up in the classroom. He went from a class of 3 and 4 year olds that had 11 other kids in it to a class of 5 and 6 year olds that has 3 other kids. Needless to say, he's doing great. He still won't sign at home much at all, but his teacher fills us in on all the signing he does at school, so there's no secrets!! It's been really hard waiting for the change to happen, but it's coming. He's maturing and I know soon he is going to want to communicate with his friends, and hopefully his family as well. Every day we get to see a little bit more of the beautiful, smart character that he is, and he never ceases to amaze me. (that last pic is him and little brother, Elias)
I thought it would be nice to share our story as a family. I hope that our experiences can encourage others and bring us closer together as a community.
My wife and I are both pretty typical Americans: raised in a rural area, by conservative God-fearing families that love sports and bbq- and we're all hearing people. My wife and I were married in June of 2008 and by October of that year, I was shipping out to basic training for the US Army. 2 1/2 years later, I returned home after a 1 year deployment to Iraq. Very soon, my wife became pregnant with our first son, Chael.
When the doctors told us he failed his newborn screening, they said it happened all the time, so we didn't think anything of it. Month after month went by, and he continued failing his hearing exams. The "specialists" at the hospital said that he was simply speech delayed and would need to see a speech language pathologist once we got to where we were soon moving to. We moved to Washington state and got a second opinion. After a sedated ABR test, it was confirmed that our baby boy was profoundly deaf. It came as such a shock to us. "We didn't have any deafness in our family" we thought. We immediately felt immensely guilty because our son of over 1 1/2 years was deaf, and we had no idea. Looking back, he was very convincing that he could "hear" things. Talking with the doctors, speech language pathologists and audiologist, we were informed of the options we had. I've come to recognize that there are often two extreme point of views when it comes to reacting to deafness. 1) Often a hearing person who is in a position of "educated authority" will say that there are ways to teach lip reading and equipment to help the deaf person hear, and that will solve the problem. 2) You can also look at it like this: there is no "problem". We've come to realize that plenty of deaf people are fully functioning, intelligent and competent people. We've realized that plenty of deaf people have made great accomplishment in academics, sports and plenty of other things. It's not that we didn't think it was possible, we just didn't know that there was such a thing as an "educational interpreter" that worked with people through college. It was all so new to us, and we slowly started to realize that we had no clue about the deaf community, even though they were right under our nose.
We had heard about cochlear implants, and knew that Chael was a candidate. At the time, it just seemed like the best thing to do. He couldn't make that decision, so we went ahead and got him his first CI and started speech therapy. During this time, we were learning and using sign because we figured even if he did get the implant, at the end of the day, he's still deaf. Our son seemed to catch on to using sign very quickly. I'd say about 2 months or so passed as we slowly learned to use the language ourselves, but suddenly we noticed his use and interest of signs slowed a lot. He soon got to the point where he became very resistant against signs, and would intentionally avoid eye contact. Looking back, we may not have been very considerate of what it was like for him. If I had someone making "loud" facial expressions and waving their hands around at me, I might not want to engage that person, either.
The instructor from an ASL class we had taken agreed to tutor us to teach us more signs and help us get better. She also is an ASL interpreter. Even though Chael wasn't wanting to sign, we thought we'd be the example of communication using sign language and hope to inspire him to do the same. We had "deaf dinners" where we wouldn't speak at all, we'd sign in public anytime Chael was with us. I would sometimes not speak for the first few hours while visiting family to try to get them to understand what it could be like when Chael gets older. We really wanted to do our best as parents to give him a way to communicate, and feel like he was part of the family. Ironically, he only closed off more. The more we signed, the more he seemed to hate it. He went through a period of time where it was nearly impossible to get him to make eye contact with even us! He received a 2nd cochlear, and continued in speech therapy. He seemed to tolerate the implants at first, but never seemed to want them on. Before his 3rd birthday, he had flushed one processor down the toilet, thrown one out the truck window while going down the road, put one in the freezer, and hidden another. We thought we were doing what was best for him, so we kept encouraging him to wear them. He had several issues with the processors before, but the audiologist insisted that the equipment was fine, and that he just needed time to get used to them. December of 2015 was the last time he wore them.
Since then, we have been so fortunate to be able to take our son to an excellent total communication school in Spokane, WA called the "Moose Project". The staff there is nothing short of spectacular and all have ties to the deaf community in many ways. As soon as we met the teachers and director, we knew it was the place for us. Relationships are extremely important to Chael- if you don't spend time with him and get to know him, he won't give you a second glance. His teacher worked a lot to get him to trust her. I believe she has helped to get him to understand that it's ok to use sign to communicate, even if everyone else is talking. Chael was recently moved to Kindergarten because he needed a step up in the classroom. He went from a class of 3 and 4 year olds that had 11 other kids in it to a class of 5 and 6 year olds that has 3 other kids. Needless to say, he's doing great. He still won't sign at home much at all, but his teacher fills us in on all the signing he does at school, so there's no secrets!! It's been really hard waiting for the change to happen, but it's coming. He's maturing and I know soon he is going to want to communicate with his friends, and hopefully his family as well. Every day we get to see a little bit more of the beautiful, smart character that he is, and he never ceases to amaze me. (that last pic is him and little brother, Elias)
