The Silencing of the Deaf
How high-tech implants are being blamed for killing an entire subculture.
Eleanor Reid was two days old when a tech tested her cochlea. The screening is routine for all newborns, and ideally it’s conducted while the baby sleeps. Ellie sucked on a pacifier coated in sugar water, but her blue eyes remained wide open as the tech inserted tiny earbuds into her ears and played her a prolonged tone. The cochlea should echo the tone back into the earbuds, but the machine registered nothing. Many newborns don’t pass the screening, the tech told Ellie’s parents, Christine and Derek. Sometimes a baby’s cries interfere with the test, sometimes fluid in the ears is the problem.
By the time Ellie’s audiologist appointment rolled around three weeks later, Derek was back at work as a foreman. Christine told him not to bother taking time off. She wasn’t worried. To make sure Ellie slept, she didn’t breastfeed until the appointment. Ellie’s howls of hunger reverberated off the walls as Christine rushed around the Braintree Rehabilitation Center in suburban Boston in search of the right office. Once there, Ellie nursed and promptly fell asleep, while nurses tested her inner ear and monitored her brain activity.
After the two-hour-plus exam, the audiologist left the room. When she returned, she was carrying a three-inch-thick packet of papers and fliers. “Your daughter has profound hearing loss,” she told Christine. Normal conversations register in the 60-decibel range, but the tests revealed that Ellie could hear nothing below 120 decibels. Through her ears, a gunshot would be no more than a whisper.
“The only thing I could think of was that I would never be able to take my daughter to an Air Supply concert,” Christine tells me, leaning into a recliner in her living room in Braintree. “Oh my god—I have the worst taste in music.” A 37-year-old New York native and a self-described “wicked type A,” Christine talks fast and laughs a lot. She inherited her love of the Australian soft-rock duo from her mother. When she was four months pregnant with Ellie, she made a bright yellow poster for her daughter and had…