Tim came into our lives and Stephanie’s practice at 3 years and 6 months. This was when he arrived in Singapore to determine if a cochlear implant would help him to hear.
Born profoundly deaf to different parents in another country, Tim had no language skills -- He has been exploring new territories since that first visit to SGH and dragged us, his new parents, and our therapist Stephanie willy-nilly along with him.
I have read that when the usual pathways for hearing don’t work and technology devises new ways to connect, sound may be felt initially, in strange places like the back or the gut. When they turned the implant on, Tim had no words to tell us where the first stab of sound hit him. But, clearly, it was not a welcome sensation … he opened his mouth and he howled!
Tim is highly adaptable. He soon got used to sound, even to the point of flushing the toilet many times a day just to hear the noises that came as he watched the swishing water. However, this did not mean that he knew how to listen. We had to help Tim practice hearing, Stephanie told us. Not difficult at first, initially we felt – just repeating one of the many beginning sounds for example the “ah” sounds for the airplane etc.
That was the start. We have since moved on from there - through linking sounds to objects, vocabulary, phrases, questions and answers – all the way to communication. Along the way, we’ve seen strange and wonderful truths demonstrated.
For example, when Tim started trying to say “SE-VEN” he aptly showed that “the spirit may be willing, but the body is weak”. With insufficient practice speaking two syllables, he just could not stop after the second. Hence, his attempts at “SE-VEN” came out “SE-vedevedveven”.
We also learnt the hard way that “it takes two to tango”. Having been coached to repeat sounds after us, it took Tim awhile to realize that “speech” is not just about imitation. It is also about communication. It took many many months before we could convince Tim that when we said, “eat up” or “sit down” we wanted him to DO IT, not repeat it.
The warning “be careful what you wish for, it might come true” was also aptly demonstrated to us. From a child who hardly vocalized and only with grunts, Tim developed in the first year into a very very loud babbler and bathroom musician! After the introduction of KinderMusik in his pre-school, he moved the singing out of the bathroom into his bedroom and supplemented the vocals with a one boy band. We were subjected to tuneless screeching, clicks, clacks, booms and bangs as well as the tinkling from his xylophone piano for more than a year!
Stephanie smiles when we visit her and recount these incidents. It’s progress, she likes to say. So… little by little and month by month, we have come to where we are. Tim has now been in Primary 1 (equivalent to grade 1 in the USA) for 6 months. He has an FM system to help him hear better in class. After only 3.6 years of listening, he is coping in school, doing well in mathematics and managing fine in English. He also has many friends and an active and chatty social life.
Our journey with Tim is by no means over. Our goals in communication competence still have to be met. Tim now has to grapple with grammar. In school, he has real trouble with prepositions and tenses. Event order is a challenge. Causality is even more difficult.
And then, there are the deeper child development and psychological questions. What are the wounds suffered by a child taken away from a familiar environment to a strange new world? How can these be healed and how can there be closure if the child still does not have the vocabulary and concepts to express these? Indeed, how old is this child who is physically a seven year old, but did not even experience language till age five and only began hearing at age four?
These issues and questions are with us most of the time. Although Tim has made more progress in the past years than we dared to hope for but we still worry. Nonetheless, with love and attention plus his inborn gumption we believe he’ll be able to meet the challenges ahead. Indeed, I’m quite sure of that. It’s a feeling I have in my gut.
Audrey Chin