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I’m stuck on a English question and need an explanation.

On September 17, 1994, Heather Whitestone became the first Miss America with a disability. Profoundly deaf since she was 18 months old, Heather’s ballet dance at the pageant wowed the audience. Since relinquishing her crown, Heather has married, borne two sons, and established herself as a popular speaker and author. In 1995, she continued her lifelong struggle to hear by undergoing a cochlearimplant.

I lost my hearing when I was 18 months old. Before I became deaf, I was communicating like any other 18-month-old hearing child. I contracted meningitis and high fever that almost resulted in my death. In an effort to bring my fever down, my doctors gave me two strong antibiotics with risky side effects. Those medications saved my life, but they also took their toll on my young body. I left the hospital with a profound hearing loss, but my parents did not know about my deafness until several months later when my mother dropped some pans in the kitchen that made a crashing sound. The noise scared everybody in the family, but I did not react to the sound. Tests revealed that I had at least a 120-decibel hearing loss in my right ear and a 90-decibel hearing loss in my left ear—and that’s why I’m wearing my hearing aid. Without my hearing aid and a cochlear implant, I hear nothing from either ear.

I have depended on a hearing aid for my left ear ever since I was a toddler, and with it I can talk on the phone, listen to music, and hear sirens. Of course, I cannot understand what people are saying on the radio nor can I understand a conversation with a group of people or hear a preacher or a speaker from the stage.

My mother was a schoolteacher, so we did a lot of homework. She chose an acoupedic approach to my hearing, which meant I had to use what hearing I had and to rely on auditory stimulation. I visited a private speech therapist twice a week. It took me six years to say my last name correctly. I did not learn sign language until I was in 11th grade. I was mainstreamed in a public hearing school until 4th grade, and then I attended Central Institute for the Deaf, which was an oral school located in St. Louis, Missouri. When I was 14 years old, I went back to public high school and graduated with 3.6 GPA without having a sign language interpreter. I had only hearing friends most of my childhood because I was the only deaf child in the public schools. However, by the time I became a teenager, I had several oral deaf friends. It was healthy for me to have both deaf and hearing friends.

Lip reading has been a primary source of communication for me, but I also listened with the help of my hearing aid. If I only read lips, I would not get very much information. When I was a little girl, I was discouraged from relying upon lip reading. My mother, my teachers, and my speech therapist would all cover their lips in order to challenge me to develop my residual hearing in my left ear.

I find lip reading very stressful and frustrating because I am often confused. One-on-one conversations are not that stressful, but group conversations when coupled with background noise are nearly impossible. Lip reading is a grueling and exhausting mental exercise and lip readers are constantly thinking and trying to discern what is actually being said. For example, if you look at person’s lips saying (the words) dog and saw, they look the same. With my hearing aid alone, I do not hear s or d sounds. So usually I have to use my common sense. Then I know it was not the saw that ran across the street—it was the dog. Most hearing people do not understand that people in my position have to think incredibly fast in order to keep up with conversations. I get real mad at those who think that I am stupid simply because I cannot hear. The truth is I get exhausted after a while and simply cannot keep up. At that point, I begin to guess at what is being said and eventually give up and choose to be quiet.

I was relatively content with my deafness and my hearing aid until my oldest son started to become more independent. He began to walk away from me instead of being in my arms, and he also began talking more. He often asked me questions about the sounds he had heard, and I could not answer his questions because I did not know what he was hearing. I also realized that I missed his crying from a distance. One time in particular, Little John fell down in the backyard and I saw my husband walking to him and comforting him. My husband had heard him crying and I had not. It bothered me in a great way because I wanted to be there for my boys. That is why I chose to have a cochlear implant in my right ear.

Prior to having cochlear implant surgery, I wore only one hearing aid in my left ear. I had not heard a sound from my right ear for 28 years, not even with the help of hearing aid. [As a result] my right ear and brain connections did not have an opportunity to develop language and speech when I was a toddler. For adults like me who have not heard sounds for many years, the decision to receive an implant is more complicated as many people in my position have no history of comprehending sound. Further, my brain is not like that of a child and is not very interested in learning to do something new.

My husband, John, my boys, my mother, and [my] mother-in-law were with me when I first heard my first sound—the clapping hands of my audiologist, Jennifer Yeagle. When I first heard the clapping, I heard it and thought it was a dream. Then she clapped again. It hit me that the sound was real, not a dream. I immediately began weeping.

During the first four months with the cochlear implant, I learned that having better hearing takes much determination and a lot of faith in God. Changing my lifestyle is painful and frustrating, but I believe it is worth it because I did finally hear my boys’ cries from the backyard. Four months after surgery, I realized that I was beginning to understand my boys’ speech better. For example, before I had a cochlear implant, my oldest son had to repeat what he said about ten times. Now he only has to repeat two or three times. I am getting better at hearing.

Source: Whitestone McCallum, Heather. n.d. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Heather.

www.heatherwhitestone.com/site/content/faqs.shtml

Reflection Questions

1. What might Whitestone McCallum be able to share about active listening?

2. What kind(s) of listener do you believe Whitestone McCallum to be?

3. How is Whitestone McCallum’s understanding process different because of her disability?