Forty-six years ago, babies weren't screened at birth for hearing problems. Schlatter was part of a military family that moved often, and because she lip-read well and picked up some muffled sound through the bones around her ears, no one realized she couldn't hear.

When she moved to Texas with her family as a fourth-grader, Schlatter was tested at school.

"That's when they told my parents that I was not slow, but I could not hear," she said.

When she was in her late teens, surgeons put donated bones in her ears.

Suddenly, she could hear. And it was scary.

"If you haven't heard anything, and all of a sudden you have this world that is so loud coming at you.. you're kind of on edge until you get used to it," she said.

But she fell in love with opera, after a friend introduced her to it.

"When they break out in song, that's when they're really sharing their feelings," she said, her face taking on a glow.

Over the next two years, her body started building scar tissue around the foreign bone, immobilizing it and all but silencing the world again.

Once again, voices sounded like the teacher's in "Charlie Brown" specials: "Wa wa wa wa wa wa."

She relied on devices to amplify sound, a TDD phone, hearing aids, service dogs, interpreters. Insurance doesn't cover most of those, she said, and expenses add up quickly: $500 to $3,000 for a hearing aid; $100 a year for batteries; $250 to $1,000 for a TDD phone; $30 to $65 an hour for an interpreter.

Schlatter wonders whether those costs ever cross the minds of people who have their iPods at full volume or drive their stereo-thumping cars down the street.

"When you mess with your hearing, you don't realize the expenses you're looking at," she said.
She wonders whether people know how isolating hearing loss can be.

"You're locked out of so many jobs," she said, when you can't answer phones or respond to intercoms.

Schlatter found a job, as a cook at Wichita Children's Home. At Three Angels Church, she met and fell in love with and married Dan Schlatter, who learned that if he caught her attention before he started to speak, she could lip-read and understand him.

About three years ago, her physician referred her to Thomas Kryzer, a Wichita otologist. Schlatter's type of deafness isn't rare, the ear doctor said, but it is less common than nerve deafness, and it is unusual to have it in both ears.

First on her right ear and just recently on her left, he used a laser to remove scar tissue, then took out the problem-causing bones and replaced them with bone made from artificial material.

And now, for the second time, she can hear. Kryzer thinks her long-term outlook is good.

Maslow, Schlatter's 14-year-old service dog, has retired and now is just one of her pets.

She bought the videos of "Phantom of the Opera" and "Evita." It's her dream to buy season tickets to the Wichita Grand Opera when the medical bills are paid off.

"And I like birds. And I like a good gospel choir," she said.

One night recently, she had to ask her husband what that sound was. He listened. It was the refrigerator cycling on and off.

He has had to adjust, too. He used to get up early and turn the radio on. She used to not be bothered by the noise.

"He can't mutter under his breath anymore," Schlatter said. "I'll catch it now."

Getting her hearing again feels as if "a big cloud has kind of gone away," she said.

That's why she just can't understand why people would damage their hearing with personal stereos and loud radios, and why parents wouldn't make their kids turn those things down.

"I just don't want people to end up having to pay for their kids' hearing loss," she said.

"I mean, you know, hearing is such a gift from God."

By Karen Shideler
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/nation/13914378.htm