Written by Jacob Cassidy

How I Lost My Hearing

Topic: Transformational Articles

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This is a story that even I didn’t know until recently. The year was 1983 and I was just born and cradled into the world.

Like many newborns, I had jaundice, a common pathology that shows up as yellow discoloration of the skin and whites of the eyes caused by excess bilirubin in the blood.

However, unlike most newborns with jaundice, I wasn’t treated for it because my parents didn’t have medical insurance and the family doctor didn’t think my parents had any money to pay him and downplayed the issue.

My parents were sent home with me with just the causal advice to keep an eye on my condition. My mother watched me closely and noticed I was turning increasingly more yellow. She called the doctor concerned with my condition and he told her to wait another day.

The following day my skin and eyes were yellowier. Mother called again, getting ever more worried. The doctor simply asked if I was eating and sleeping ok. “Yes, I was”, said mother. “There’s no concern then”, he said.

The third day my condition continued to amplify. Mother again called the doctor, and again the doctor gave a run around. This went on until the fifth day after I was born, when the doctor, finally exasperated by my mother’s increasingly frantic calls, told her if she was that concerned, to bring me in for a bilirubin blood test.

The Test

So off we went for the test. Shortly afterwards, the nurse sent us home saying they would call immediately if the test came back high. No call came until the doctor checked in the next morning and asked us to come back in for another test. The first test had come back with a level 23 (to put that in perspective, my older sister was hospitalized at level 6 when she was a baby).

After the second test was administered, the doctor tried sending my parents home again, saying he’d call when the test results came back. My parents, sick of all the run around, were having none of that and refused to leave until things were taken care of.

When the second test results came back, the abnormally high level of 23 was confirmed, and yet the doctor, knowing my parents had no medical insurance and believing they had no way of paying for anything, tried sending us home again to wait and see if the condition would clear up on its own.

Frustrated and angry, my parents refused, so the doctor told them he would call a couple pediatrician specialists for a second and third opinion. With my parents sitting in his office listening in, he called two specialists whom both said I was at a very critical level and needed to be admitted IMMEDIATELY.

Hospitalized

Because my bilirubin level was so high at level 23, I had to have a complete blood transfusion done immediately, and then be hospitalized under special lights for nearly a week for my bilirubin blood levels to return to a safe range.

My parents were told by the specialist who came in and worked on me that my condition was so severe there was a great chance I would have suffered permanent brain damage if another 24 hours had lapsed. My hearing loss was still undiscovered at this point.

While checking out, my dad told the family doctor he should be liable for the expenses because of his complete and utter disregard for my well being, or they were going to sue for neglect. The doctor said he needed to talk with his supervisors and get back to him.

When the doctor came back, he offered to cover half the bill, and my parents accepted (being as they have never sued anyone, nor ever want to). Then 2 days later, the secretary of the specialist that worked on me, called to setup a payment plan. My parents told her of the agreement and she got real quiet for a moment, then said “Let me get back to you on this, I need to do a little research.” And research she did.

A while later she called back and told my parents the family doctor had told his supervisors we were a welfare case (my parents have never been on welfare) and asked the supervisors to cut our bill in half. He set it up so he wouldn’t lose any money, the half that would be cut would be the specialist’s half, and he would be safe from being sued for neglect this way without any loss.

The secretary did some more research and called back a little while later to tell my parents they were dropping the bill completely as the doctor had acted in an unprofessional and unethical manner, and disciplinary action was being taken.

This unethical doctor is still in practice in Anchorage, Alaska to this day. He’s remaining unnamed here because this incident happened nearly 27 years ago and I see no need to get into a battle about what happen then. It won’t change anything now. I’m choosing to focus on where I want to go now, instead of investing my mental and emotional energy battling the past.

It wasn’t until around 4 years after this incidence that my hearing loss was discovered. I still wasn’t speaking correctly and was yelling everything I said. It was around the time I was to begin preschool that my mother took me to get my first hearing test. I was PROFOUNDLY DEAF. What a shock and life altering diagnosis that was.

The Impact On My Life

My parents were advised to keep me in mainstream schools and raise me as normally as possible. I was fitted with my first hearing aids and begun speech lessons that would last until high school. The Deaf community where I grew up was almost completely nonexistence (I met 2 deaf people in my entire life there) and I never learned sign language until I went to a Deaf college when I was 21 years old.

This isolation from the Deaf community was both good and bad. On one hand, I had to rely 100% of my verbal skills to communicate with others, which led to my speech development being incredible by deaf standards (most people never know I’m deaf when I’m talking with them unless I otherwise tell them – even then, they think I’m pulling their leg).

On the other hand, this isolation led to me being stuck between two worlds, never being able to fully communicate with either. My signing skills are weak (something I want to fix in the near future) so I can’t communicate with deaf people well. And my ability to comprehend what anyone is saying verbally in anything but the best of situations (no background noise, clear loud speech in close proximity) makes it hard to socialize with anyone outside of one-on-one meetings in quiet rooms. This led to extreme social isolation for me. And as anyone who has studied a lick of psychology knows, humans thrive off of social interaction and fall apart without it.

In the end though, it’s just given me a greater challenge in life to overcome. And greater challenges, as long as they can be overcome, led to greater growth and development. I almost didn’t make it through this challenge in my early 20’s, but now that I have, I feel it’s only going to add to what I experience in life and leave behind in my legacy.

Life is good :)

Posted on February 11, 2010

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