Finding Zoe. Gail Harris
was my own private miracle. Watching Zoe filled me with such joy, I could hardly contain it. For a second, I worried again that, just maybe, I loved her too much—and that my three sons felt that I loved them less. This is my cross. No matter how many times they tell me how much they feel my love, I can’t help feeling that way.
It has to do with the fact that Zoe, like me, is deaf.
Within my community, the Deaf community, my situation is somewhat rare because most deaf people have never also been hearing. It’s been a gift of sorts as it allows me to be with hearing people one minute and deaf people the next, and generally, to be at ease around hearing people. Because I could already speak before I became deaf, I do have some speech—what I call a “deaf voice.” At first, most people think that I sound funny, but after a short while, they are usually able to understand me. Because I lip-read, I never give a second thought to going into Starbucks and asking for a cup of coffee. I know what to expect: I’m going to ask for the coffee; they’re going to ask me if I want room for cream. I’ll say yes; they’ll tell me how much it costs. I’ll pay and then leave. I feel in control of the situation.
This ease with life was not easily won; however, it was inextricably linked to my desire for a daughter, something I’d been aware of ever since I was a little girl. When each of my three sons was born, each was my pride and joy. Yet their births just widened the hole that could only be filled by my having a daughter, for a reason I had yet to discover. As I look back on my life, with the gift of time and hindsight revealing everything, it was as if God had swooped down from above and said, “Here’s your deaf daughter. You, Brandi, of all people, deserve her.”
The first step of that journey began one fateful day in March of 1974.
THE BLINDING LIGHT is what I remember most. I wanted to put my hands over my eyes but was too weak to do so. It was 2:00 AM, and I was lying face up in the emergency room, more scared than I can say. I don’t remember much else before being electrocuted, or so it felt, but I do remember the doctor turning me over, pushing aside my hospital gown, and rubbing my lower back with alcohol. I can smell it now.
Then came the blow—a sharp prick sending excruciating shock waves up to my head and down to my toes. I let out a scream, which my mother, who was outside in the hallway, couldn’t bear to hear. I was only six years old. The doctor had given me a spinal tap, and there was nothing left for my mother to do except swallow her tears and wait for the results.
Thus began two weeks of hell for her and two weeks of drifting in and out of sleep—rather peacefully—for me. The days leading up to that night, when I was burning up with a fever, had been much worse for me. I remember reaching into the freezer for ice cubes to put on my forehead. It was March 1974; I was in kindergarten. We lived in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. My mother had already taken me to the doctor, who said that I had a bad flu but I would be okay. He was so wrong.
The day she took me to the hospital, I had been lying on the living room couch. My mother had come over and sat down next to me. “How’s my sweetie?” she asked. I shook my head. She kissed me on the forehead and then went into the kitchen to talk to my father. “Bill, call the babysitter to cancel,” she said. “We can’t go out tonight.” They had theater tickets for a show that was playing in Chicago. My mother came back to me and took me upstairs to my room. I must have fallen asleep because I remember waking up, hours later, and feeling like I was going to die. I called my mother. She came running into my room. “Mom, I don’t feel good,” I told her.
“Can you put your chin to your chest?”
“It hurts,” I told her, after trying. She couldn’t remember how she knew to ask that question, but remembered that if the answer was no, it was a very bad sign. I was wearing my favorite pink-and-white pajamas, and she picked me up, wrapped me in a blanket, and then took me to the hospital while my father stayed home with my brother, Bryan, who was a year and a half younger than me. The doctor who admitted me said that it looked like I had spinal meningitis, but that the spinal tap would confirm his diagnosis.
About an hour after my mother heard me scream, the doctor came into the waiting room to talk to her. “Mrs. Sculthorpe, please sit down.” My mother’s heart skipped a beat. “It is spinal meningitis—a very bad case. We’re doing everything we can, but you need to be prepared. We’re not sure if she’ll make it through the night.”
That’s when my mother turned to the doctor and said, “She will not die, doctor. She will not die.” Years later, those words would make me stronger.
They put me in isolation and gave my mother a gown and mask to put on before coming to my room. A profoundly spiritual woman, that night she felt betrayed by God. Where are you? she asked him silently. Why is this happening? Why are you letting this happen? She sat in my room and wept for hours, holding my hand.
The night passed. I didn’t die. Then the next passed. When it started to look as if I were going to live, the question then became what havoc the illness would wreak upon my body. Deafness, epilepsy, blindness, or any combination of the three were all possibilities, the doctors said. My parents were just relieved that I wasn’t going to die.
But the horror continued.
For fifteen days, I drifted in and out of sleep, the little veins in my arms collapsing from the IVs, so they had to put them between my toes and in my feet, with my mother still asking God, Why?
Finally, one sunny morning, I awakened. My father came over and sat on my bed and started talking to me. He was telling me about all of the people who had said hello, saying, “Heather and Heidi [my twin cousins], Grandma, Aunt Linda, Uncle Jerry, Doris . . .” I understood him until he got to my cousin Doris, and then I asked, “Who?” He thought that I didn’t remember who Doris was, but that wasn’t it at all—I didn’t recognize the shapes his mouth was forming. At that moment, I experienced a strange sensation of silence and knew that something wasn’t right. It’s my most vivid memory from that time because it was when I first realized that I could not hear. Finally, when I understood “Doris,” we moved on.
From that moment on, lipreading became my way of “listening” to people. The adjustment happened so quickly, seamlessly, and matter-of-factly that I don’t even remember missing hearing people’s voices—or at least, I didn’t allow myself to. I don’t think that I was lipreading right off the bat, yet I don’t remember struggling with the sudden loss of communication. The inclination to lip-read just took over. Knowing what I do now, I believe that I was in a readied state. It was as if I had been given the talent to lip-read.
Nevertheless, at the time, it was all so confusing. I had been so sick, and this new silence was so strange that I didn’t understand what had happened to me. Looking back, I think that my strong need to survive, to get back to the life I knew as fast as I could, had already kicked in with full force, and I didn’t even fully grasp that I could no longer hear.
My parents, however, were beginning to grasp it. Once or twice, my father talked to me with his back facing toward me, and, of course, I didn’t answer, which keyed him right into what the doctors had said. Then there was the day when he and my mother had arrived at my hospital room around noon, and we spent the afternoon sitting around talking (I got as much of the conversation as I could), watching TV, playing cards, and reading magazines. I also napped for a while and was quickly regaining my strength. Late in the afternoon, one of the window shades in the room suddenly flipped up, making a loud noise—pfpfpf-pfpfpf-pfpfpf. I didn’t stir. My mother, already hypervigilant to my impending symptoms, really became concerned.
An hour later, when the pediatrician came to check on me, she told him how I hadn’t reacted to the loud noise. He put his watch to my ear and asked me what I heard. “Tick tock,” I told him.
“She can hear,” he said.
I don’t