Page 69 of Give Me a Sign
“Nope, that’d be me. I’m Bobby.” He steps forward and holds out a hand, which probably makes Max feel grown-up, since he immediately straightens his shoulders, eager to impress.
“Nice to meet you,” Max says, shaking Bobby’s hand.
Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes. “Yeah, Bobby’s all right.”
“Hey,” Bobby says. “I’m more than all right. Just ’cause you’re biased toward a certain other counselor—”
“Hey!” I nudge Bobby with my elbow. “Seriously, don’t.”
Gary gives my dad a clipboard with the arrival paperwork he needs to complete. Meanwhile, my mom walks over and tells me something that I don’t hear.
“What?” I ask loudly.
Immediately, she looks at my ears. “Is it pool time?” she asks, speaking up.
I shake my head.
“Lake time? Bedtime?” She narrows her eyes.
I shake my head again, frustrated, knowing exactly where she’s going with this. “My hearing aids are back in my suitcase. It’s fine. Gosh.”
She purses her lips and shakes her head. “Your audiologist————.”
Is she still lecturing me about my hearing aids?
“I said, your audiologist says hi.”
“Yeah, I got that. Were you there recently?”
“Max had an appointment with her. And with the otologist. He had a sharp decline in his left ear.”
“Oh.” I watch Max to see what his reaction is, but he and Bobby are chatting away like old friends. My mom’s being very serious about his hearing loss.
“So we’re seeing if he’s a candidate for a cochlear implant.” She stares off toward the trees.
“I guess. Well, tons of kids here have one.” To me, CIs kind of seem interchangeable with hearing aids in some ways, but they’re definitely more involved, especially the setup.
“It’s a major surgery,” my mom says, presumably wondering why my reaction isn’t bigger. “Well, it’s supposed to be ‘minimally invasive,’ but it would still take at least six weeks for his head to recover before they could turn it on.”
“Can he just stick with two hearing aids, then?” My brother and I both had a dip in hearing at our annual exams. I’d hope this would get my family to take learning ASL seriously. But instead, my parents are jumping right to surgery.
“The hearing aid isn’t working well enough for that ear anymore.”
“Then he could go without it?”
She shakes her head. “He needs it to hear us.”
I can tell that this is the end of the discussion, which tracks. While Max and I are free to attend Deaf camp, we do live in thehearing world. Our school accommodations are based on using speech and hearing aids. They do not include services using ASL and interpreters. I’m sure the doctors are pushing for the surgery as the next logical step, proclaiming it’s the best option.
But maybe it is? In some ways, surgery could be seen as the simpler option, since it’s unlikely that everyone around Max would learn an entire new language to communicate with him. Especially since he’d have to also learn the language himself.
I can see both sides of the debate, and it’s not an easy decision. I know what my own preference would be, but it’s him going under the knife, not me.
So what does Max think?
After hours, I wait for Isaac at the firepit. Mackenzie is there by the picnic table with her laptop, editing her latest video.
She waves me over. “Would you mind taking a look?”
