Once upon a time in November, a boy was diagnosed as deaf.  That boy’s father gives thanks.

Dates in November are significant in my professional and personal life.

I just completed 20 years at my job, receiving a plaque from our government thanking me for “loyal and devoted service.”  My first day 20 years ago, a Monday, was the week of Thanksgiving; I was thankful to the government for employing me and providing a paid holiday the first week of work!

The day the government shut down in 1995, November 14, was the day Ben was formally diagnosed with severe to profound hearing loss in both ears.  I remember taking sick leave rather than going to work (where we were required to report only to be summarily  dismissed, as lack of funding had shut down all non-emergency services).

Instead of work that Monday, Wendy, Ben and I headed to Georgetown University Hospital for a scheduled auditory brain stem response (ABR) test, designed to tell us more about Ben’s apparent hearing loss.  We had been to the hospital the previous Friday, where hearing tests were attempted with Ben to provide an assessment.  No formal assessment was made, and the staff cleared the schedule so that we could have the ABR test on Monday, which required a mild sedative for Ben.  Curiously, we accepted the lack of assessment regarding whether Ben was deaf, although that was the reason we were at the hospital.  We accepted the inconclusiveness of it all — come back Monday when we can have a pure scientific evaluation, looking at the brain’s response to auditory stimuli rather than trying to get Ben to drop a block if he hears a sound.  I accepted because I was in denial.

The weird November weekend — emotionally vacillating from denial and hope to acknowledgement and no hope — passed, and we reported for the ABR test that shutdown Monday.  This time, post testing, there was no stalling by the staff as the results were clear:  your son is deaf!

Our beautiful boy, just three and half years old, was deaf!  Our boy, who two months earlier was clearly hearing (in a videotape he is responding to questions while not looking at the questioner), had moderate to severe sensorineural hearing loss bilaterally.

The rest of that government shutdown week, many hours were spent crying.  I grieved  over how I assumed Ben’s life was to have been, which it was not going to be.

Ten days later, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Ben had a CAT scan at Children’s Hospital, which yielded an official diagnosis — enlarged vestibular aqueducts, formed in vitro, predisposing him to deafness within the first five years of life —  for all the good it did to attach a cause to the reality.

The world changed on that shutdown Monday, a portal to a new world opened up.

• Ben’s life was what it will be, not what it was going to be.

• The unarticulated but inherent assumptions about his future were not to be.  Vague dreams dissipated.

• Everything about his future was ours for articulation.   Dreams reconfigured.

• Communication was our necessity.

• Cueing was our (eventual) modality.

I followed Ben through that portal to a new world, a world which has profoundly shaped me.  I give my thanks daily for the joy of the physical Ben, and for who he is, the metaphysical Ben.  Deafness is just a part of his wonderful and special self.  I give thanks for the world of deafness.

The courage to be who I wanted to become.  It comes back to Ben, and his deafness.

Give thanks this special Thursday, and every day, for the beauty in the world around us and the love in our hearts.  May you too find the courage to be who you want to become.