I should not have been surprised by what the audiologist was saying to me and my husband. Hearing loss runs in my family. My mother was profoundly deaf, and so were my grandfather and great uncles. And yet when we were told our daughter had a moderate to severe hearing loss and would have to wear hearing aids for the rest of her life, I felt as if I had been hit by a bus. I was dead.
It was 1996, and we were sitting in a spartan doctor’s office in downtown New York. It wasn’t a warm and cozy environment like our paediatrician’s – there were no pictures of dinosaurs on the walls or puzzles strewn about. No low, cushioned seats for the kids to sit on. The consulting room was dark, with one blinking fluorescent light, a metal desk and a couple of wooden chairs. The centre was a not-for-profit that cared for those with hearing loss and deafness. What they lacked in decor they more than made up for in their mission.
