11

Deafness as a Choice

As sum­mer turned to fall, the Cubs had gained con­fi­dence in their skills and their team­work. They were win­ning. On the last day of Sep­tem­ber, halfway through the reg­u­lar sea­son, the Cubs played anoth­er small Chris­t­ian school, Luther­an High School from La Verne, a city on the east­ern edge of Los Ange­les Coun­ty. It was a lop­sided game, and at half­time the Cubs were already ahead, 46–0. As the third quar­ter began, the coach­es put in a play­er who had just joined the team. His name was Dominic Turn­er, and he stood a lit­tle taller than six feet and weighed around 240 pounds, a good deal of it pan­dem­ic weight. He had a well-pro­por­tioned jaw­line and brown hair kept in a tight, Ivy League hair­cut. He had trans­ferred to CSDR a few weeks into the school year and had imme­di­ate­ly caught the eye of Kei­th Adams. Adams wast­ed no time to make his move.

“You’re kind of a big guy; you would be a good line­man,” Dominic remem­bers Adams telling him. Dominic told Coach Adams he didn’t like foot­ball much. He hadn’t grown up watch­ing it—his grand­moth­er who raised him nev­er had it on—and his pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence try­ing to play at hear­ing schools had been an exer­cise in alien­ation.

Keith’s sec­ond son, Kaden, the back­up quar­ter­back, was also in the gym class, and he joined in the recruit­ment effort. Pret­ty soon, the entire gym class was try­ing to per­suade Dominic to join the team. And it worked. Dominic fired off a text to his grand­moth­er: “Pick me up at 6:00 p.m. I’ve joined the foot­ball team.”

Dominic had attend­ed sev­en dif­fer­ent schools in his fif­teen years of life, but none had quite worked out. He was a good stu­dent, gen­er­al­ly get­ting As and Bs, but as a deaf boy in hear­ing schools he found his social life frus­trat­ing. In ele­men­tary school he was rarely invit­ed to par­ties or birth­days or to friends’ homes after school. He was teased because of his deaf­ness.

“They would ask me to say stuff, and then, when I couldn’t say it right, when I couldn’t pro­duce the words right, that was fun­ny to them and they would laugh,” Dominic said. He found him­self watch­ing as class­mates chat­ted and played. “I felt so alone. No one was com­mu­ni­cat­ing with me at all.”

The best word he found to describe how he felt in those schools was “for­eign­er.” It was a pow­er­ful sen­ti­ment con­sid­er­ing that he was any­thing but for­eign to South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Born in River­side, he spent his child­hood there and in Mis­sion Viejo, a city not far from the ocean in Orange Coun­ty.

In the fall of 2021, after Cal­i­for­nia schools had emerged from their COVID lock­downs, Dominic had made the last-minute deci­sion to try CSDR. It would be his sec­ond time: he had attend­ed the school as an infant and kinder­garten stu­dent. Now he was return­ing, abrupt­ly, des­per­ate to find a place where he felt more at home. He was leav­ing his hear­ing school even as his sopho­more year was already under way.

In the game against Luther­an, Dominic took his place on the defen­sive line, crouched down, and put one hand on the turf, set for his first play. It was a pitch to Lutheran’s run­ning back, and as soon as the ball was snapped, Dominic drove the cen­ter out of the way and with the help of his fel­low line­man Alfre­do Bal­tazar tack­led the run­ner for a loss. Not bad for his very first play in a CSDR uni­form. The Cubs went on to win the game, 68–0, and their record improved to 5–0.

After years of search­ing, Dominic had found his place. Final­ly, he had this coach and this team where com­mu­ni­ca­tion wasn’t a prob­lem. The pan­dem­ic was still rag­ing in the fall of 2021, and the mood in Cal­i­for­nia was one of frus­tra­tion. But when a vis­i­tor asked Dominic how he was enjoy­ing his foot­ball sea­son, he did not hes­i­tate. “Very fun,” he said. “Very, very fun.” He was a “for­eign­er” in Cal­i­for­nia no more.

Dominic was born pro­found­ly deaf. But lat­er in life his deaf­ness came with an aster­isk. At five years old, he under­went an oper­a­tion to install, under the skin behind his ear, an elec­tron­ic device known as a cochlear implant. Dis­tinct from hear­ing aids, which are a set of tiny micro­phones and speak­ers that ampli­fy sounds and pipe them into the ear at high­er vol­umes, cochlear implants com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly with the brain. They are basi­cal­ly bion­ic ears. They trans­late sounds into elec­tri­cal impuls­es that stim­u­late the nerve that con­nects to the brain stem. The stuff of sci­ence fic­tion only a few decades ago, they allow most deaf peo­ple who under­go the oper­a­tion to hear in vary­ing degrees. For Dominic, whose moth­er tongue is ASL, which he learned as an infant, the implant gave him a fac­sim­i­le of hear­ing and put him in an unusu­al posi­tion. He could switch between the hear­ing and the deaf worlds at will. He could wake up in the morn­ing and decide whether to have five sens­es or four. It was some­thing unimag­in­able to gen­er­a­tions before him: it was up to him whether he want­ed to hear—or not.

Often, he chose not.

The cochlear implant, a device that would rock the deaf world, was a Cal­i­for­nia inven­tion pio­neered by the son of a den­tist, William House. House grew up on a ranch in Whit­ti­er, a city in Los Ange­les Coun­ty halfway between the coast and River­side. He attend­ed both den­tistry and med­ical school and was an invet­er­ate tin­ker­er who seemed to enjoy buck­ing the med­ical estab­lish­ment. He per­formed one of his first inno­va­tions, an exper­i­men­tal surgery to treat the inner-ear afflic­tion called Ménière’s dis­ease, on Alan Shep­ard, the navy test pilot who in 1961 became the first Amer­i­can in space. Ménière’s can lead to debil­i­tat­ing ver­ti­go, and Shepard’s career had been threat­ened by bouts of dizzi­ness, tin­ni­tus, and vom­it­ing. When oth­er treat­ments failed, Shep­ard secret­ly trav­eled to Los Ange­les to be treat­ed by House, who at the time was a rel­a­tive­ly obscure den­tist and researcher pub­lish­ing papers on his exper­i­ments. The surgery was suc­cess­ful, and Shep­ard went on to join the Apol­lo 14 mis­sion that lift­ed off from Cape Canaver­al on Jan­u­ary 31, 1971, and rock­et­ed to the moon. Shep­ard became famous for whack­ing a golf ball using a makeshift six iron in the thin atmos­phere on the moon. From space, he spoke to House, who was a guest at Mis­sion Con­trol in Hous­ton. “I’m talk­ing to you through the ear that you oper­at­ed on!” Shep­ard said from 230,000 miles away.

At the time of the moon mis­sion, House, already deep into his exper­i­ments with cochlear implants, was on the receiv­ing end of heavy crit­i­cism. Some doc­tors believed that send­ing puls­es of elec­tric­i­ty through the inner ear could cause irrepara­ble dam­age. Oth­ers sim­ply said the device would not work. One pedi­atric ear expert was quot­ed say­ing there was no “moral jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for an inva­sive elec­trode for chil­dren.” But House per­sist­ed, and in 1984 the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion approved the sale of his device. It was a crude ver­sion of what would come lat­er. Patients report­ed being able to hear door­bells and car horns and muf­fled speech, sounds like “that of a radio not com­plete­ly tuned in,” House said on the day the FDA announced the approval of the implant. But even in its more prim­i­tive form, there was a sense that his­to­ry was being made with this new prod­uct. “For the first time, a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human sens­es,” the deputy direc­tor of the FDA, Mark Novitch, said at a news con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton when House’s inven­tion was intro­duced. “Soon a device like this may pro­duce an under­stand­ing of speech to many for whom even crude sound would have been con­sid­ered hope­less just a few years ago.”

Four decades lat­er, implants have to some extent achieved that goal. Richard K. Gurgel, one of the lead­ing researchers in the field of cochlear implants, esti­mates that around 95 per­cent of deaf peo­ple are can­di­dates for implants and that the tech­nol­o­gy employed in the devices has improved by leaps and bounds. In many coun­tries, includ­ing Swe­den and France, deaf chil­dren receive cochlear implants almost as a mat­ter of course. Implants can now be equipped with Blue­tooth tech­nol­o­gy so a per­son can lis­ten to a pod­cast or receive a phone call that is direct­ly trans­mit­ted through the implant to the brain. Although most devices today con­sist of two pieces—the part that is embed­ded under the skin and a part that attach­es, by mag­net, on top of the skin—future mod­els will be ful­ly implant­ed and thus invis­i­ble to oth­er peo­ple.

Cru­cial­ly, how­ev­er, cochlear devices do not pro­duce what would gen­er­al­ly be con­sid­ered nor­mal hear­ing. Ann Geers, a devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist who has been study­ing cochlear implants for four decades, says a user might hear sounds that are some­what “mud­dy” or “under­wa­ter.” Users can have dif­fi­cul­ties dis­cern­ing between male and female voic­es and detect­ing the nuances of emo­tion or sar­casm. What a user hears varies enor­mous­ly from per­son to per­son. One objec­tive mea­sure­ment, dis­tin­guish­ing notes on a piano, illus­trat­ed the vari­abil­i­ty of the implants’ suc­cess: In a 2012 study, four out of eleven chil­dren with cochlear implants were able to dis­tin­guish between a C and a C‑sharp. But one child could not tell a C from an F, and two oth­ers heard no dif­fer­ence between a C and an E.

The effec­tive­ness of cochlear implants also depends very much on the set­ting. Using them in noisy places, like a cock­tail par­ty, can be chal­leng­ing. In 2020, a group of Aus­tralian researchers pub­lished a sci­en­tif­ic review, a meta-analy­sis of research on the effec­tive­ness of implants in adults. The study found that the qual­i­ty of the sound that patients were able to hear var­ied con­sid­er­ably, as did their abil­i­ty to under­stand speech. After surgery, patients on aver­age under­stood 74 per­cent of sen­tences read to them in a qui­et set­ting and 50 per­cent in a noisy envi­ron­ment.

Cochlear implants are clear­ly imper­fect. But thou­sands of pro­found­ly deaf peo­ple use them to inter­act with the hear­ing world, whether at jobs or social­ly. As of 2019, around 740,000 cochlear devices had been implant­ed world­wide, accord­ing to the FDA. In the Unit­ed States, 65,000 chil­dren were fit­ted with the devices, with each oper­a­tion typ­i­cal­ly cost­ing in the neigh­bor­hood of $30,000 to $50,000.

For the deaf com­mu­ni­ty world­wide, implants have been a point of debate and con­tro­ver­sy. In the ear­ly days of their adop­tion many deaf peo­ple were wary of them. They feared the devices would but­tress the idea that deaf peo­ple need­ed to be “cured” and that tech­nol­o­gy could do it. Deaf­ness was not can­cer, they argued, not some­thing that need­ed treat­ment in the same way a dead­ly dis­ease does. With sign lan­guage, mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty were ful­ly able to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er. The prospect of “fix­ing” deaf chil­dren raised ques­tions about the future of an entire cul­ture, of Deaf Cul­ture. For more than a cen­tu­ry deaf peo­ple had bat­tled for the right to sign-lan­guage instruc­tion. They wor­ried what would hap­pen to their lan­guage, and to the entire way of life that came with it, if chil­dren were urged to accept implants. What if Basque speak­ers or Nava­jo speak­ers were told they were bet­ter off get­ting a device implant­ed in their brain because their lan­guage was too obscure?

In the Unit­ed States, enroll­ment in deaf schools, the heart of deaf com­mu­ni­ties across the coun­try, was falling for a vari­ety of rea­sons, and the deaf com­mu­ni­ty saw implants as has­ten­ing their decline.

The tech­nol­o­gy bit­ter­ly divid­ed fam­i­lies over whether par­ents should have their deaf chil­dren implant­ed, a ten­sion cap­tured in the 2000 doc­u­men­tary film Sound and Fury, where a deaf cou­ple, Peter and Nita Artin­ian, decide against pro­vid­ing a cochlear device for their five-year-old daugh­ter, Heather. At one point in the film, Peter Artin­ian lash­es out, “Hear­ing peo­ple think that deaf­ness is lim­it­ing, that we can’t suc­ceed. I say, no way!”

Two decades lat­er, the sus­pi­cions toward implants have by no means dis­ap­peared in the deaf com­mu­ni­ty. But atti­tudes have soft­ened some­what. The avail­abil­i­ty of implants coin­cid­ed with hard-fought vic­to­ries for deaf activists in oth­er areas: greater acknowl­edg­ment of ASL as a lan­guage like any oth­er; the pas­sage of the Amer­i­cans with Dis­abil­i­ties Act in 1990, which man­dat­ed sign-lan­guage inter­pret­ing for places like hos­pi­tals. Tech­nolo­gies like closed-cap­tioned tele­vi­sion and the iPhone bridged some of the gap between hear­ing and deaf com­mu­ni­ties.

In one mea­sure of the reduced wari­ness toward implants, five years after Sound and Fury was made, Heather, the girl whose par­ents had vehe­ment­ly reject­ed the device, received one, along with her moth­er and oth­er deaf rel­a­tives. “I just want­ed to be able to com­mu­ni­cate with the major­i­ty of peo­ple who live in this world who are hear­ing,” Heather told a pub­li­ca­tion at Har­vard Law School, where she grad­u­at­ed in 2018.

In a mov­ing speech at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty, which Heather attend­ed as an under­grad­u­ate, she dis­cussed how dif­fi­cult it was to learn how to speak. After receiv­ing the implant, she had speech ther­a­py class­es every day after school, and at first her class­mates did not under­stand her. She some­times had to rely on sign-lan­guage inter­preters. But she con­tin­ued to refine her speech. “I was will­ing to put in the work and I saw the results,” she said in the George­town talk. “I had a won­der­ful fam­i­ly who sup­port­ed me through all this,” she said. Some words like “Mary­land” and “things” and “human beings” are muf­fled in her George­town speech. For peo­ple unfa­mil­iar with her sto­ry, it might have been chal­leng­ing to fol­low. She spoke about how her room­mates asked her to repeat her­self “all the time” because they didn’t under­stand her. But Heather, like Dominic Turn­er, had forged this uncom­mon path. They didn’t have to reside exclu­sive­ly in the hear­ing world. Or in the deaf world. They just stay in the “mid­dle,” as Heather Artin­ian called it.

Dominic Turner’s ear­ly years with the cochlear implant are tes­ta­ment to the hard work of learn­ing to speak. It was a painstak­ing jour­ney, and one that left him uncer­tain for years where he fit in. At the same time, it was a won­drous process that hear­ing peo­ple take for grant­ed. Gain­ing hear­ing when he was five years old meant that he had to con­scious­ly learn the sounds that he was hear­ing. His grand­moth­er Joanie Jack­son, who raised him, would point out sounds through­out the day.

“Lis­ten! That’s the sound of water,” she would tell Dominic. How else would he know what the trick­le of liq­uid sound­ed like if it wasn’t point­ed out to him? “And that’s a bird. Did you hear it?”

“It was con­stant­ly iden­ti­fy­ing sounds,” Jack­son remem­bered.

For years, this process would require, for Dominic, the con­cert­ed study of sound. Even as a teenag­er, a decade after he received his implant, he found that he need­ed to con­cen­trate on speech to ascer­tain it.

“Eng­lish is a for­eign lan­guage to me,” Dominic said.

Dominic Turn­er lives in a world that hear­ing peo­ple might find hard to imag­ine.

He tunes in to the hear­ing world when he wants to: At the beach, he likes hear­ing the sounds of waves. He wears his implants to the movies. He enjoys the roar of cer­tain car engines. But he removes his implant and enters a world with­out hear­ing when he is around nois­es that he finds unpleas­ant. He dis­likes high-pitched voic­es and peo­ple who laugh too loud­ly. He finds the sounds of traf­fic rush­ing past dis­tract­ing, and in those set­tings he prefers to hear noth­ing at all.

At school and on the foot­ball field, he keeps the implant off and thrives in the world that he is most com­fort­able in, sign­ing with his friends and teach­ers.

Dominic is con­vinced that when he gets mar­ried, it will be to a deaf woman.

Com­mu­ni­cat­ing with deaf friends is faster and “more effort­less.”

“I just feel that it’s more fun,” he said.