From Silence to Sound

What it’s really like to hear for the first time after growing up totally deaf

I didn’t hear a damn thing until I was six.

When my parents discovered my deafness at four months, the audiologist told them that I was the deafest baby she had ever met. I didn’t react to even the loudest sounds, which were noted as no-reaction on my audiogram. The most powerful hearing aids did nothing, so I ended up feeding them to the dog (to my mother’s horror). My cochlea was the equivalent of an auditory black hole: sound just disappeared without as much as a blip registering in my mind. Contrary to popular belief, this sort of congential total deafness is rare. Most deaf people have some sensation of sound, just not enough to make sense of it. Not me, though. I could say that I had never known sound, not in the way most people did.

Sound in a Silent World

It wouldn’t be fair to say that I was totally ignorant of sound. The dimension that I understood was the one I could feel. It was in the rhythms and vibrations of the world around me. My mother’s footsteps thumped as she approached my room to catch me sneaking out of bed. Rock music at a live concert made the bones in my body reverberate in time to the beat. A loud noise slammed into my chest, almost as if someone had punched me. Others heard sound; I felt it. In a way, this relationship was more elemental. I understood sound for what it was: vibrations.