The ABC's of Hearing
What if you can't hear the ocean?
 Courtesy of the
Hearing Foundation of Canada
At the Metropolitan School for the Deaf, a young deaf boy flourishes in a special environment.
Nine-year old Tristan Barnett joins in enthusiastically as O Canada plays before morning announcements at his school. His hands moving subtly at his sides, Tristan’s eyes are glued to the television monitor in front of him.
Tristan isn’t singing the national anthem - he’s signing it - along with six other students in his grade four class at the Metropolitan Toronto School For the Deaf.
These signed morning announcements (students also present news, weather and sports) are just one of the features of Tristan’s school. Classes are small - Tristan’s class of seven is typical. Students and teachers communicate almost entirely in sign language and many teachers are themselves deaf or hard of hearing. All of them have a specialist certificate in educating deaf and hard of hearing students.
Tristan is clearly at ease with his surroundings. He’s shy but still he confidently tours visitors through the school. Later, he playfully teases a classmate who hadn’t finished his homework.
He’s good at math. He says science is his favourite subject. He seems pretty much like any other kid.
"He’s not different here," says Tristan’s mother Pat, who, with her husband Carey, rouses Tristan for the early morning, hour-long bus ride to school.
"Yeah, it’s a long bus ride," Tristan says through an interpreter. In fact, the path from Tristan’s Etobicoke home to the school near Yonge and Davisville, was much longer than Tristan is aware of right now.
Tristan was born deaf nine years ago, says his father, Carey Barnett. Barnett noticed the problem within days of this birth, but it was nine months before Tristan was diagnosed. There were other conditions, too. Most urgent was a congenital defect called Hirschprungs Disease, where the patient has no nerves in the lining of the bowel wall, impairing bowel motility. When he was four months old, Tristan had six inches removed from his bowel. Barnett says that problem took precedence early in the boy’s life and may be part of the reason doctors overlooked his deafness for so long.
When his hearing impairment was finally diagnosed, Tristan was immediately fitted with hearing aids. (He can hear a spoken voice, but can only make out vowel sounds and the "sh" sound. The work "finish" sounds like "ish" to Tristan.) The aids he wears today are expensive ($795 for each ear plus $50 for ear molds \) and are replaced about every three years.
Tristan started school at a special hard-of-hearing class at SunnyLea Elementary School in Etobicoke.
He also had auditory-verbal training at Sick Kids hospital, which focuses on teaching the child to listen and imitate sounds, attempting to make the most of a child’s residual hearing.
"He was at the point when he should have been starting to produce speech and he wasn’t," explains Carey Barnett. "But based on the premise that he would persevere, we had held him back from Metro Deaf."
It soon became evident that perseverance wasn’t enough. Tristan had mild oral apraxia, which made it difficult to use his facial muscles to speak. His parent’s agreed that he stood a better chance of learning with sign language and he was transferred to Metro Deaf almost two years ago. Since then, his parents have learned ASL and his grandparents took a course too.
The bus ride may be long, but the days are easier than they were a few years ago when Tristan visited the surgeon at Sick Kids once a month, attended audio verbal therapy every week and visited an audiologist every three months.
Today, he visits an audiologist twice a year and has occasional gastro-intestinal check ups. He has friends at school and his father says he likes to play Star Wars and has watched the latest movie a half dozen times or so. He’s smart as a whip, likes Pokeman, has a great memory and an even better sense of humour.
"He likes to play practical jokes," Carey Barnett says. "And he loves to play hiding. He just loves it. But we can’t get it across to him that he has to be quiet. He’ll go hide and we won’t even have to look for him because we’ll hear him giggling. That’s the upside, you know. He’s a great little guy."
| 