She got married, traveled with her Air Force husband, had three young children and got a divorce.

The normalcy stopped one day at work with the Home Nursing Agency after she put a client on hold to reschedule an appointment.

When she returned to the phone, she couldn’t hear herself say, “Thank you for holding,” or anything from the other end.

A hearing aid battery problem, she figured, so she excused herself.

But a new battery didn’t help, so she got her supervisor, told her about the “stupid hearing aid,” and went to the store.

After trying five new batteries, she took a hearing test that registered 0-0, and she and the store manager realized her hearing was gone.

It can happen just like that when there is prior nerve damage.

So for two years, she struggled.

“My life shut down,” she said.

Home Nursing offered to accommodate her, but she didn’t want to work.

There was ringing in her ears, and humming and roaring, like the sound of a noisy skating rink or a rushing train.

She lashed out at her kids, then 10, 7 and 3.

“I think I made their lives miserable,” she said. “If I didn’t understand you, it was your fault.”

She would light a candle near an open window and remember music. Music she could only imagine.

She thought of suicide.

Eventually, she got a job at Sheetz, for which she remains grateful, and then a job helping deaf people at the Center for Independent Living of South Central Pennsylvania.

Slowly, she began to get to know others like her.

They taught her sign language, showed her what they needed her to do and introduced her to deaf culture.

“They pulled me in,” she said.

She continued to struggle.

But one day someone told her to “stop fighting it” and if she did, it would all fall into place.

“She was right,” Kelly, 54, said, in a conference room at the center, where she still works.

“It was the deaf community that taught me to accept who I am,” she said.

Interaction with the hearing world remains difficult. Even comic.

When she booked a room at a Philadelphia hotel to attend a conference, they told her they had accommodations, but when she got there, she found no flashing alarm clock. So the manager agreed to wake her personally. But she forgot to leave the door unlocked. So she woke the next morning to the crash of her door falling in, with him on top, making good on the promise.

That experience led her to get a hearing dog, who can wake her when someone knocks.

Driving her son to school on Sixth Avenue, she wondered why the kids on the sidewalk waved and the crossing guard scowled, and why her son always took the music tape he was listening to in the car into school with him. The kids stopped waving and the crossing guard began to smile after she found he’d been playing gangsta rap at high volume.

When her kids went out in the evening and ended up at places they hadn’t told her about or came home late, they always claimed she hadn’t understood them. So she got them to put it down in writing, and that took care of that.

At her job, she’s helped lots of others find their way, said Susan Estep, center executive director.

Kelly is personable, thinks matters through and calms those who come in worked up — usually about the peripheral things that plague disabled people, Estep said.

She helps the 20 to 25 clients on her roster among 300 deaf in seven counties to deal rationally with their problems, Estep said.

Deaf people gravitate to her, she said.

One young woman came from a foreign culture that regards people with her disability as worthless, she said.

She’d been abused and taught virtually nothing.

Kelly started “from scratch,” gave her the confidence to break away from her father, helped her find an apartment, taught her to grocery shop, clean her house, use a washing machine and budget money, Estep said.

Kelly tutored her so she could pass her citizenship test.

The woman blossomed and married a man who now teaches at a university in the area.

When the couple had their first of three children, Kelly taught her to support its head and bathe it.

She still helps her with technical problems, like a malfunctioning teletypewriter phone.

“You care about people, pay attention to what they say, start to identify where all the problems are,” Estep said. “People open up.”

Kelly is “on the fence” between the deaf and hearing worlds, having lived in both.

The need for balance becomes clearest when advising people about “cochlear implanting” an operation that can enable some deaf people to experience a kind of hearing.

It’s controversial among the deaf because results can be disappointing and it can undercut incentive to learn and use sign language. It also can alienate those who get the operation from those who still can’t hear. It can seem like betrayal.

She’s supportive of those who want it, though, provided they want it for themselves, and only if they’ve learned sign language first.

Nowadays, with sign language and devices such as video phones, deaf people can get along well.

Medical people see deafness as a problem to be fixed, but it really isn’t, said Dr. Nancy Benham, assistant professor for education of person with hearing loss at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

“Deafness is not something broken or bad, so why would you fix it?” asked Benham, who isn’t deaf, but who with her husband has adopted a deaf girl.

Kelly agrees.

“My life is fine the way it is,” she said.

By William Kibler
http://www.altoonamirror.com:80/News/articles.asp?articleID=6588