What Harley Taught Me

By Nancy O., DFD Hearing Dog client

So many people have asked me, “What has Harley taught you?  You keep saying he’s taught you so much!”  Let me see if I can list them:

• You have missed more than you’ve heard in your life, but you haven’t missed as much as you think you did.  What people talk about isn’t very important or earth-shattering.  Your thoughts have actually been quite entertaining in their place.  Be thankful.
• You have thought that your family’s lives and your student’s futures completely depend on you, but you’re only a cog in a big wheel.  Now you can do what you can do and let the rest go.  Be thankful.
• You have always tried to do and be what you saw other people do and be, but they were hearing, and you were not hearing, so it didn’t always work.  You endured thousands of hours of non-understood television with your family and friends before captioning was invented, and thousands of hours of social interaction in which you were not an active participant, only a bystander who understood nothing or very little of what was said.  Now you’ve learned to structure your social life around your hearing loss, doing it the way you can do it, instead of trying to do the impossible.  Your watching tv and movies only with captioning goes without saying.  Be thankful.
• You went to school, K-12, undergraduate, and graduate, with no notetaker, no interpreter, no CART (realtime captioning).  You learned very little, mostly what you could read in texts or what was written on the board.  That’s okay.  You made it, and now you can help students not to go through school that way.  You’ve even learned to use CART or interpreters for large meetings so that you will understand every single word.   Be thankful.
• You didn’t know all your life that you were building skills by yourself that can now help others, even people who are late-deafened and have trouble in their marriages because of the strain of coping.  Be thankful.  Help those people when you meet them. 
• You thought that I would only help you with the sounds – doorbell, telephone ring, oven timer, smoke alarm, alarm clock, name call – but you found out that those things are only the beginning.  You learned that when other people don’t have to help you anymore, your relationships with them are more equal, less burdensome for them and more empowering for you.  You learned that the people in your life who welcome this are treasures, because they support your independence and dignity rather than trying to oppress you or use you to their own advantage.  Be thankful. 

I’m thankful, Harley.  Very, very thankful.   Blessings on you and DFD forever.