A cochlear implant enables children with deafness to enter the world of hearing people. Most parents are happy to accept an electronic prosthesis, but there are also some parents who do not want to correct nature’s mistakes.
Felix Eich hears thanks to the device made of blue plastic. This color is reserved for boys. Plus, it’s easier to find a camera if Felix tears it off and throws it somewhere in the corner. Recently, Felix turned one and a half years old. The first offspring of Silke Eich and Gerhard Sailer sits on their mother’s lap, smeared with chocolate. The parents say a few words to their son to present the effectiveness of the camera. The boy focuses his full attention on the chocolate wafer, which is probably why he glances at his parents once and then not.
Felix would be as deaf as a trunk without the blue camera on his head. Soon after the birth of their son, the parents noticed that the toddler did not even react to the door closed loudly. They lied to each other for a while and deluded that the hearing impairment was not very serious. Only the audiometric examination showed that the boy reacts to sounds corresponding to the sound of a plane taking off. Silke Eich admits that the medical diagnosis caused her “a tremendous shock”. In an instant, the mother’s hopes and plans for her son were called into question.
Felix regained his hearing thanks to the cochlear implant, or CI for short. Electrodes implanted in the inner part of the ear – the cochlea, a stimulator placed under the skin and a speech processor worn behind the ear can do an amazing thing: they replace the hearing organ. In this way, a deaf person can perceive auditory stimuli. Felix was less than six months old when his parents brought him to the hospital in Großhadern. After the operation, they spent many hours with their son adjusting the frequency of the sound processor. Now the parents are overjoyed that Felix reacts to every louder closing of the door. The development of a cochlear implant completely revolutionized the world of deaf people. Deafness is no longer an irrevocable twist of fate that cannot be changed. This position is represented by one group of parents. The second believes that the implant destroys the family’s current life.
Iris Ricke is a slim, attractive woman with short auburn hair. He lives in the Bavarian town of Aying. The landlady closed the curtains in the living room. The sun only throws a few bright spots on the floor. Iris Ricke and her three children – 17-year-old Antonia, 13-year-old Balthasar and XNUMX-year-old Terzian – communicate with each other through their eyesight. They are unable to communicate if the sun’s rays blind them and prevent eye contact. Three children are born deaf. A sign language interpreter is present to help me understand the importance of Iris Ricke’s hand movements. Together with her deaf husband, they decided that none of the three children would have a hearing implant.
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The hands explain that Iris Ricke wanted to spare her children what she had gone through in her childhood. She grew up as a child of hearing parents who did not know how to communicate with their deaf daughter. They didn’t want little Iris to use sign language, they just learned to speak like other children. “They didn’t accept that I was totally deaf,” says Iris Ricke. If anyone has heard how difficult it is for deaf people to articulate sounds, they can imagine what Iris Ricke went through.
Parents sent their daughter to a school for hearing impaired children because she allegedly had a better level than a facility for deaf children. Iris could speak quite well, but still did not feel integrated into the world of hearing people. – I constantly faced various language barriers, because being deaf, I couldn’t hear my own voice and I couldn’t correct my pronunciation. On the other hand, I couldn’t communicate with deaf people because I didn’t know sign language, she explains. She has always lived on the border of two worlds, not belonging to any of them. Therefore, she decided to spare her children painful dilemmas and eternal tears.
During the afternoon meeting, I begin to understand the barriers between the world of hearing and deaf people. For example, when the interpreter leaves the room for a while. For a few minutes, my hosts and I look at each other with a polite smile. The silence between us is not an expression of embarrassment, but of simple helplessness. Finally, the youngest Balthasar gets up from the table and turns on the TV. A movie with Jan Bean is currently playing. The boy chuckles to himself as he watches the situational humor devoid of communication barriers.
Iris Ricke believes that many implant owners live torn apart on the border of two worlds. So far, little long-term research has been conducted to document the development of hearing and speech in children implanted with a cochlear implant. A doctor from Zurich, together with a surgologopedist, examined a group of children aged 3-9 years in terms of long-term development of language skills. The test result was in line with expectations: children with an implanted implant acquire speech much slower than their peers without hearing impairment. About a third of implant wearers have mastered the spoken language almost as well as children with normal hearing. One third of the children experienced long delays and one third had to communicate using sign language. The research shows that the cochlear implant is an opportunity, but not a XNUMX% guarantee of verbal communication with the outside world. Implant holders can hear and speak, but in many cases their language skills will be very limited. On the other hand, a child with a cochlear implant, raised by hearing parents, rarely masters sign language fluently enough to communicate effectively with deaf people.
In recent years, the cochlear implant has aroused a lot of controversy and has had both die-hard supporters and opponents. On one side of the barricade there are doctors and implant owners, who treat the apparatus as a miracle of modern medicine. Last year, an article was published in Germany entitled “Do Deaf Children Have a Right to a Cochlear Implant?” The author even proposed that parents who are critical of implanting their children should be deprived of parental rights. The thesis put forward in the text is not only controversial, but even scandalous, taking into account the extreme opinions about the cochlear implant published on the Internet and in professional magazines.
On the other side of the barricade there are people who treat the implant as a threat. They are concerned not only with the danger of linguistic isolation. By publishing critical articles and organizing information meetings, they fight the belief that implanting an electronic device makes sign language completely useless. Some American scientists even talk about cultural genocide against deaf people. The term is very drastic indeed, but fewer and fewer children are using sign language. The cochlear implant significantly reduced the number of deaf people. Currently, the number of implant users in Germany ranges from 30 to 35. people.
Iris Ricke argues that she does not want to play big politics, she is not interested in the war waged by some on cochlear implants. However, when hosting this nice, deaf family, it is clear that in the frenzy of heated discussions and extreme opinions about implants, there is a group of people who defend themselves against a medical device that destroys their language and culture. The dilemma involves the question of society’s readiness to accept misfits, people who consciously and voluntarily choose to live differently from the rest of society.
John-Martin Hempel is the head of the otolaryngology department at the Großhadern Clinic in Munich and specializes in cochlear implantation. The surgeon says he accepts the parents’ decision to refuse to implant the child. – I do not try to convince them to change their minds at all costs – he says, although it is not easy for him to come to terms with the attitude of his parents. Doctor Hempel also operated on Felix Eich, when it turned out that in his case the hearing aid was completely useless, as the boy had profound hearing loss. The surgeon is happy with every child who can be implanted with an implant. It tells about teenagers aged 15-16 who were not implanted in childhood. Later, at school, they met their peers hearing with an implant and also wanted a similar hearing aid.
Unfortunately, implant placement does not solve the problem. There is a high probability that a person who in childhood did not learn to acquire auditory stimuli with the help of an “artificial ear” will not acquire this skill in adulthood. It will become the so-called a passive user who, admittedly, has an implanted implant, but is unable to make proper use of it, because he has not learned to interpret the perceived sounds. Therefore, infants who are deaf from birth should be operated on in the first year of life. Parents make a decision that will affect the child’s entire future.
Dr. Hempel says he usually declines a teenager’s request for an implant. It is certainly a difficult decision for a doctor when he communicates to the patient that he is unable to help him. – In such cases, I am aware that these children have been deprived of the opportunity to ever learn the spoken language and participate in verbal communication with the environment – explains the head physician. – Usually, it is about parents who opposed the implantation of a cochlear implant in their offspring. I would not like to be in their shoes and hear bitter reproaches from adolescent children. It turns out that there are many positive examples. Iris Ricke’s daughter Antonia is a cheerful, self-confident teenager who turns into a large group of deaf friends. There is no bit of bitterness or resentment at her parents. Medicine that is developing more and more dynamically is able to prevent the birth of children with specific diseases. The discussion of implants is about answering the fundamental question of where is the “normal” line.
Iris Ricke did not learn sign language until college, when she was able to make independent decisions as an adult. – Only then did I feel safe. I realized that I was finally in the world I really belong to – he explains. Therefore, she decided to spare her children the painful search for their own identity. The authors of the restriction of parental rights to mothers like Iris Ricke believe that her attitude is an expression of extreme irresponsibility. But are they right? Outsiders are not able to judge the rightness of this kind of life choices.
Naturally, there is a personal attitude of parents and their experiences behind a parenting decision. If the child speaks a language that they cannot understand, sooner or later they have to accept that they will not be able to communicate with their own child. That is why deaf parents most often refuse to have an implant inserted.
Several months have passed since meeting Felix Eich. The little boy understands everything that is said to him. The mother admits that she lags behind her peers in speaking, but keeps making progress. During the summer, Felix had a second implant inserted. Thanks to this, it hears in both ears and knows where the sound is coming from. Now Felix perceives the world in stereo.
Also read: Attention, we are going deaf!