How a Scientific Accident Changed My Sister’s Life
And mine as well.
On February 25th, 1957, French doctors André Djourno and Charles Eyriès made a shocking discovery. A man came to them with facial paralysis and hearing loss, looking for help. With no hope of curing the hearing loss, they attempted to repair the facial paralysis, but, instead, the man came out with a little more hearing than he went in with. Call it the happiest accident in the world, call it luck, call it what you will, but in the process of grafting his facial nerves, they hooked an electrode into his inner ear. He experienced a whizz, a whirr, a crackling electrical hum, and found that he could distinguish through the veiled sounds simple words like “ma” and “pop.”
Now, over 60 years later my sister, Ruthie, says “mom” and “dad” with no issue.
Ruthie, wasn’t born deaf, but it developed rapidly. Her inner ear, too cavernous, allows its fluids to slosh about — a steady, unchanging tidal wave of white noise. When she was nearly two, we discovered her defect. I, the oldest of five, understood better than the rest that Ruthie’s hearing problems implied a host of issues beyond the problem itself. It was hard on my parents. There were fundamental times they couldn’t get back, punishments for perceived disobedience they would never be able to rescind. They worried mostly, though, that Ruthie would face injustice because of her disability.
Then we learned about the cochlear implant. As it turns out, Djourno and Eyriès’s discovery was just the beginning of what became a life-changing technology. Despite losing interest in their findings, their reported results caught the eye of Dr. William House in 1961. House, along with Dr. John Doyle, performed the first implantation that year, and the cochlear implant was born. In essence, a cochlear implant is a device that bypasses the damaged inner ear and pulses electric signals directly into the brain, effectively representing sound.
Ruthie got cochlear implants when she was two. In a sense, she doesn’t even hear sound; she receives a useful reconstruction of it in the same way that artificial sugar is a reconstruction of sugar. She hears something similar to sound. Still, it isn’t quite the same. It’s beautiful in a way, though — the fact that she perceives reality a shade differently than the rest of us do. Her experience of life is what makes her herself.
Ruthie, wild and fun, sings in the shower even though she can’t hear herself (the implants have to come out in the bath). The noise she makes is something between a dying deer and a bear that just woke up. She’s never been afraid to make noise, even when she can’t hear it.
Ruthie, always eccentric, sometimes falls asleep with ear muffs on because people are being “too loud.” She takes her implants off while Mom is giving her instructions and taunts, “I can’t hear youuu.”
Ruthie, always kind, doesn’t know a person who isn’t her friend. She seems incapable of recognizing gaps in age or ability.
It’s funny how life works. One day, a deaf man gets accidentally zapped in the auditory nerve. Now, my sister hears.
I often find myself going back to one moment, early on. Ruthie had only had her implants for a little while, and she was standing outside with my Dad. She watched a bird for a while in silence, following it with her head as it flitted about chirping. Wide-eyed, she turned to Dad and said, “I hear it! Do you hear my bird?” Dad, a stoic man who is untouched by most emotions, blinked back tears as Ruthie, his little deaf girl, was excited over something as simple as a bird chirp.
Ruthie reminds me that there are so many things I take for granted. She reminds me that birds are beautiful, and that I don’t sing as often as I should in the shower, and that I am not kind enough to those who are not like me. Ruthie reminds me that kindness and happiness are more than enough to answer hardship. Now, sometimes I take an extra minute to listen to my favorite song. Sometimes I stop to greet a friend. Sometimes I slow down to listen to the birds chirping overhead.
A note from the author: This is in no way meant to be an argument that all deaf people should receive cochlear implants. Each situation is different, and this is a personal account. The cochlear implant is a controversial and ongoing discussion in the deaf community, and I recognize that.
