I Just Am

This is a book written by Bryan and Tom Lambke. Bryan is Tom’s son and has Down syndrome. Bryan wanted to write a book about what it was like to live with Down syndrome. It was a fun book. It is a children’s book so it is pretty easy to read. Every page has a picture and underneath the picture there is a sentence or two. For example one page has a picture of Bryan playing basketball. Underneath the picture it says, “I play basketball. I like to shoot hoops.”

There were also some interesting facts at the end of the book. They were facts about Down syndrome and what it is. There were also facts about what kind of health issues are most common among people with Down syndrome.

This was a fun book. I really like that Bryan wanted to write this so that people will be less ignorant about Down syndrome. He had some help from his father which shows the love his parents have for him. I will be able to use this in my career as I will be working will people who have Down syndrome, among other developmental disabilities. It makes me get excited when I think about how I can somehow help people with Down syndrome and know that they will be teaching me too.

"Deaf Sentence"

This is a fictional novel written by David Lodge. It is about a retired professor of linguistics in England named Desmond Bates. He is having a bit of a hard time getting used to being retired. His wife owns and works in a store selling furnishings while he is stuck being a stay-at-home retiree.

He has another problem too. He is losing his hearing. He needs hearing aids to be able to have a basic conversation with someone. His life gets a little adventurous as a PhD student enters his life. She is a little bit crazy and seems to really like Desmond. He also has an 89 year-old father that lives in London and is a little bit quirky. The story follows Desmond over the course of about 6 months. There are a few instances where not having good hearing is problematic for him. He has some akward moments because of that.

This applies to my life right now as I am studying Audiology and Speech-Language Sciences at UNC. We have observed many clients that have hearing problems in the clinic in the basement of Gunter. I had never really thought about what their everyday life is like though.

There are a lot of things to remember such as keeping extra batteries on hand so you don’t run out in the middle of a Christmas party (which happened to Desmond) or even just remembering to put your hearing aids in when you leave the house. This book will help me to remember what life is like for all of those people I will come in contact with in my everyday life as a Speech-Language Pathologist.

Sound of Fury

This documentary follows a couple of families in New York who have strong ties to the deaf world. It gets a little confusing on paper for who is in the different families, but there are two main families. Both of the husbands of the families are brothers. One is hearing, the other is deaf. The deaf brother, Peter, is married to a deaf woman and they have three deaf kids. The oldest is Heather, who is five. She expresses interest in getting a cochlear implant. As a family they check out what getting one entails. The mother decides she would like to get one, but when she finds out it wouldn’t help her a whole lot, she decides not to get one. She also decides that Heather won’t get one either. This causes problems with Peter’s parents who are both hearing and think that Heather should have one. There are some heated debates and in the end, Peter moves his family from Long Island to Maryland.

Peter’s brother, Chris, is hearing and is married to a hearing woman (although she signs since her parents are deaf) and they have twin boys. One of the boys is hearing and the other is deaf. They decide to have their deaf son implanted with a cochlear implant. This causes some more contention in the family.

An update of the story six years later shows that Peter moved his family back to Long Island. Heather, one of her brothers and their mother end up getting cochlear implants. They seem to be doing really well.

This affects me a lot because my Associate’s Degree is in American Sign Language (ASL) interpreting and we studied deaf culture a lot. My wife and I have had a lot of “discussions” about this topic. She insists that if we had a deaf child, we would implant them. For a long time, I highly disagreed. She had some good points. One of them was that I have really bad knees and my kneecaps will have to be replaced someday. My knees are bad and they can and will be fixed. If our child’s hearing is bad, it can be fixed. My problem with that is that once that implant is taken off or if the batteries die, they are deaf. We have made a compromise. If we do have a deaf child, we will implant them, but we will teach them ASL as well as oral communication. If you don’t implant them very early, the chance of talking well diminishes rapidly. Once our child is old enough, they can make the decision to be a “hearing” person or to take the implant off and join the deaf community.

I Am Sam

This movie is about a man with the mental capacity of a 7 year old. He has a daughter with a homeless woman who takes off at the first chance she gets. He is crazy about the Beatles and names his daughter Lucy Diamond. He raises her with a little help from his friend next door. As she gets older, she starts having a hard time at school because she doesn’t want to become smarter than her dad. She gets taken from him and he “hires” a lawyer to do his case pro bono. In the course of the case, he loses and Lucy is placed in a foster home. During the trial, his lawyer learns a lot about love and what that means in her life. In the end, even the foster family falls in love with same.

This movie is one of my favorites, but even so, I watched it again for this project. I had forgotten just how good this movie is. I like that at least one of his friends in the movie actually has a disability. I liked this movie for a number of reasons, one of them being that they show how someone with a disability can be treated in everyday life, but also in the courtroom, which was new for me. It was also really good because it showed that while someone with disabilities can look or act differently than what we expect, they aren’t very different when we get to know them. Having worked in various jobs with people with disabilities for the last decade I was able to appreciate that.

Willowbrook

There was an institution in New York, called Willowbrook, which housed people with physical and developmental disabilities. It was an absolutely horrible place. The people living there walked around naked because there weren’t enough people (staff) to help them get their clothes back on. In one part of one of the videos, a staff member was hand-feeding a resident. Hand shoving might be a more appropriate phrase for what they were doing. The staff then stuck their hand in the residents’ water cup for some reason. Residents would hang out around the radiator just to get some warmth.

This information will help me in my current job. I work for Envision here in Greeley. I work in a residential setting, meaning I go stay with our clients in their homes and help them with their chores and cooking and whatever else they need. One of my clients is in his eighties. He was in an institution when he was younger. I can’t say much but he did have a hard time there. I have always had some respect for him because of his experiences, but now I view him in a whole new light. What he went through was even worse than what was happening at Willowbrook too. This new knowledge will help me be even nicer than I already am to him.