Deaf Like Me essay
Hearing impairment or total deafness, of course, is a very sad diagnosis both for a child and his parents. It is hard to accept the fact that the little person is deprived of the opportunity to take such a rich and diverse world of countless sounds for a whole life. Moreover, it is much harder to realize that the illness is building an invisible barrier between the baby and the people around, while this barrier isolates a deaf person from the world. However, it does not mean that the destiny of such a child is to live in total loneliness and isolation. Thus, the book Deaf Like Me is about a family constant struggling with adapting their deaf daughter to the world around her and teaching her to communicate with others. This is an amazing book that demonstrates the family’s desire to help their deaf child, and it proves that it is extremely important to struggle for normal life for deaf people.
To begin, it is necessary to mention that the main book’s characters are Louise and Thomas Spradley, their son Bruce, and their daughter Lynn. Thomas and Louise Spradley before the birth of their deaf daughter were an average American couple, and they were young, happy and married, and had one child (Bruce), being deeply loving the boy and dreaming about great future. Only God knows what can happen in human life, and one summer day Bruce became ill with German measles, or rubella. This illness has changed the family’s life forever because Louise discovered that she was pregnant and the disease negatively influenced the newborn. It was an awful time of waiting the baby because Thomas and Louise were informed about possible congenital defects in the newborn but they still had a hope that everything will be alright with their baby. The doctor’s warning was the main acting hero of constant nightmares for the couple.
When a girl baby was finally born, she was a perfectly normal and healthy child; moreover, her parents even relaxed from their constant fears and were happy about their life. Unfortunately, trouble never asks the time to come, and Louise and Thomas found that Lynn Spradley had some hearing problems. It was a real blow for the family because it meant that their calm life had stopped and new problems appeared. After a barrage of tests doctors put a diagnosis of deafness to the girl, and the diagnosis changed the family’s life forever.
Analyzing the life of the family, it goes without saying that the daughter’s deafness made parents to be worried about their child and the book demonstrates their constant attempts to change the situation and to adapt the girl to social life. The main component of our life is communication, so the parent’s task was to teach Lynn how she can communicate with people around her. On the one hand, Lynn was able to lip read many words, but such skills were not enough for normal life, so, on the other hand, Lynn was still alone and she felt a kind of isolation that led her to constant frustration. Everything of this, led Louise and Thomas to the idea that American Sign Language may help the family to be closer to each other, especially after the case when Thomas met a group of deaf adults who communicated using ASL. Louise and Thomas finely realized that deaf people are able to communicate as well as hearing people using their special instruments such as ASL, and the parents not only taught Lynn to sign but they also mastered this language by themselves. As a result, the girl was given a great instrument not only to show her wishes and thoughts but also to communicate, while ASL gave Lynn her own voice of signs and made her life full of new emotions and ideas.
Reacting on the book, I need to say that Deaf Like Me opened me a new world of human possibilities and I enjoyed the reading. Being honest, I want to say that the reading was not easy enough because it is always hard to read about human feelings and I was worrying about the life of the main characters as about the own family. I was also interested in the way how tests of hearing loss are made, and I found a new fact for myself that there exist several levels of hearing. Previously, I thought that the word “deaf” means total deafness, but after reading the book I realized my mistake. In addition, I want to say that this book may be a kind of inspiring reading for families with deaf children because it demonstrates the way how parents can love their child with different disabilities and congenital problems, and that there always exists the way to adapt such a person to surrounding reality. Moreover, the book also demonstrates that every path has many difficulties on it, and families who have the same problems should realize that they are not alone in their trouble, as well as the book opens the world of deaf people to hearing people, showing that a deaf person has the same wishes, feelings and problems as hearing people, and it is necessary to remember this fact and help others to be active members of our society.
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