I'll Scream Later (No Series) Read Online Free Page A

the same time, they wanted to make sure I could navigate the Deaf world as well, so my earliest memories are of moving constantly between the two. Feet firmly planted in both.
    As soon as they began to finally accept that I was Deaf, my parents threw themselves into finding out everything they could about how to help me navigate life.
    The first group of specialists they consulted suggested that I be sent to a school for the Deaf, essentially institutionalized, which was the most common practice at the time. So my parents packed me and Marc into the backseat of the car and drove to St. Louis, which had two highly regarded schools for Deaf children.
    One of the schools specialized in the oral tradition—no signing, you were instead taught how to speak and read lips. The other was more focused on teaching American Sign Language as the foundation for communication and developing an understanding of Deaf culture. Both boarded students through the week, with weekends spent at home.
    After the visits, my parents sat in the car in the parking lot of the last school we visited and, once again, cried. They couldn’t live with the notion of shipping me off to a boarding school, but they weren’t sure what other options were left to them.
    Ultimately, they decided that they would find a way for me to attend mainstream schools with Deaf-education programs—thatusually meant long bus rides, but allowed me to live at home. They found a doctor in the area who specialized in the oral tradition, essentially teaching the Deaf to speak and to rely on lipreading for communication, and I started working with him several times a week by the time I was three. I was fitted with hearing aids to assist any residual hearing that might be there. I had one for each ear, although the doctors had determined that I had absolutely no hearing in one ear and was roughly 80 percent Deaf in the other.
    I didn’t appreciate these efforts at the time. The speech lessons were extremely difficult, especially for a three-year-old—sometimes I screamed going in and coming out of them. I did grow to accept them, the lesson learned was not to reject help—I knew at some point in my life I wanted to be able to speak as well as I possibly could.
    As a child, I also hated those hearing aids. I was forever trying to get rid of them, tossing them whenever they bothered me, resulting in periodic searches through the neighborhood with a reward of candy or a dollar offered to any kid who found and returned them. One day I threw them out the car window, and my aunt Sue stopped in traffic and retrieved them before anyone ran over them. The worst time was when I was in the fourth grade. I had slipped them into my brown paper sack during lunch. The bag, and my hearing aids, both went into the furnace. This time it truly was an accident, but no one believed me.
    My dad was always trying to smooth things over. When people on the street would ask about the hearing aids, my dad had two stock answers. If an adult asked and it was baseball season, he’d say I was listening to the Chicago Cubs on a transistor radio and if they were nice, I’d tell them the score. If a kid was asking, he’d tell them I had bubble gum in my ears, and then I’d chime in, “You want some?”
    With my dad working long hours running the used-car lot, my mom shouldered much of the tough stuff—taking me to doctors, always looking for better answers, arranging and shuttling me to speech lessons, as well as dealing with a child whose energy level and interest in exploring the world were extremely high.
     
    O VER THE YEARS , various theories emerged on why I became Deaf. One doctor suggested that maybe it was genetic. When my mother heard that, she searched for anyone on either side of the family who was Deaf.
    She still tells the story of meeting a woman one day at the beauty shop. After hearing about my condition, the woman said she, too, had relatives from the Gomel area of Russia who knew of the