My Dad has had a progressive hearing loss and wore hearing aids since he was a young boy. While growing up, I was aware that life was different at our house. We were the only family I knew that had two telephones side by side. One was an extension on the same line and whenever my father was talking on the phone, mom would listen in and write down the conversation. That way she would help catch any words that he missed. The same arrangement at his office allowed him to function as an insurance salesman for many years. By the time I finished college, dad could no longer hear on the telephone at all.

My childhood friends liked to come to my house to use our fancy speaker-phone setup to make prank calls. But when I was a teenager and able to drive, no one wanted to ride with me in our family car. We always purchased the car with the low-end factory AM radio, no FM, no stereo speakers, no cassette player, because dad couldn’t hear us when there was music playing in the car.

He and I did a lot of remodeling of our house when I was in junior high school. Plumbing, carpentry, electrical… I learned how to do it all. But it wasn’t so much about us working together as fathers and sons often do. Most of the time he showed me what needed to be done and how to do it, but because of our difficulty communicating, I was pretty much on my own after that. The usual father-son relationship was different due to his hearing loss. For this reason, I take extra care in how I interact with my kids.

I really wasn’t aware of just how much my father’s hearing impairment impacted our behavior until I was away at school. One weekend, I brought home my college sweetheart (who later became my wife) to have dinner with the family for the first time. While we were eating nobody spoke, and because of the silence, she became concerned, thinking that my parents didn’t like her. But that was just the way it was at our house. Since even the clatter of china and tableware was an obstacle to father’s hearing, we waited until everyone had finished eating before conversation.

In 1993 my father finally got a cochlear implant and it has worked extremely well for him. As soon as the implant was programmed it was clear that it was a success. We were in the car going home that day: I was driving, dad was in the passenger seat next to me and mother was in the back seat when she said, “You know, he is doing so well with his cochlear implant, I guess I won’t be able to talk behind his back anymore.” He promptly turned around to her and said, “You’re right!”

While I was going through medical school I tried to keep an open mind about specialties. I did my rotations in pediatrics, and gynecology, but when I did ENT (ear nose and throat) I knew that this was it. I loved it! Many patients tell me that they have no difficulty hearing me and understanding what I’m saying, that I’m the easiest person to understand of anyone they know. I attribute this to learning how to communicate in a hearing impaired home.

William Slattery III, MD is the head of Clinical Studies at House Research Institute and a physician at the House Clinic.