At first I thought what a horrible thing it was, and how it could happen to someone so small and innocent. My little sister was 3 when we first discovered that she couldn’t hear. At first my parents thought that she was just being stubborn when she didn’t start to talk, but then it got serious. They took her to a few specialists and they ran tests on her hearing, they all said the same thing. My sister was deaf, she had a lot of hearing loss. Most likely, they think, she was born deaf. I remember my mom would cry every time they told her, and my sister she would just sit there and giggle. She had no clue what was going on. My dad, he just never really liked to talk about it. I remember feeling sad and weird about it at the same time. I mean I really never thought that something like that could happen to someone as close as my own sister.
As time passed I got more and more used to it, we all did I think. We all got used to her wearing her hearing aids everyday and her not understanding a lot of the things we say. Now she’s 10 years old. She still, however, go to a “special” school in Topeka where she’s been since she was in first grade. They teach her sign language there but they also teach her how to speak so she spends half of her days in a classroom with other deaf children and the other half with normal children.
Today I think that having a disability doesn’t mean that you have to sit around all day feeling bad for yourself. You can go out and do what you love and try new stuff and be happy. Today, my sister acts like a normal 10 year old girl, she likes to play she loves to read and watch television of course.
This is why I believe that everyone can overcome their defects and disabilities and become whatever that it is they want to become, do whatever that is they want to do, and be whoever they want to be.