I'm listening as hard as I can

At the age of twelve Terry won a swimming award at a camp for handicapped children. Her name was called over the loud speaker and the girl next to her yelled into her hearing aid that she had won. She began to walk up front realizing that she was the only child not physically handicapped.

When all had calmed down, she began to feel distant from the other children and sorry for herself. She was ashamed of her type of handicap. Terry wanted a more visibly noticeable handicap. She felt like being deaf wasn’t a real handicap. She began to feel very guilty during her time at the camp. Terry was able to do things that other children with worse handicaps couldn’t. She later realized after living seventeen years of the normal life not to feel so guilty. She now knows that every handicap has its downs.

Most people with the handicap of being deaf are born with it or go deaf when they are babies. Terry lost her hearing over a period of time. At the age of twelve was when she really had the hardest times with her hearing. Although Terry is deaf she can talk and people can understand her. She learned to talk before

wrong. She first noticed that everyone had begun to get blurry profiles and their speech seemed slurred and foreign to her. It took her teachers figuring out that something was wrong before anyone every really knew.

she lost most of her hearing. Because Terry could talk normal and lip read, she passed herself as what we would call a “normal” person.

All throughout college she always told people that she was only hard of hearing. She didn’t want to be classified as a deaf woman. She did everything in her power to hide any sign of her handicap. She lied to everyone about her deafness, fearing that she would be thought as someone who was different. It was her senior year in college that she had a nervous breakdown and was put in the hospital for three days. After this experience she started to come to terms with being deaf. She then proceeded to tell people about her handicap. Some people were afraid to talk to her, while others were sympathetic.

After she stopped straining to hear she learned that sound could be refined through feeling. She then taught herself to listen to people through their moods and postures. Something else she has learned is that her being deaf has made it easier to concentrate on her other senses.

When her mother was seven months pregnant she had really bad kidney infections. Her mothers’ doctors gave her too many antibiotics. Terry was then born two months later, assumed to be a healthy baby. Nobody reali

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