I"m Listening as Hard as I Can, by Terry Galloway explains her life as a person with the handicap being deaf.
At the age of twelve Terry won a swimming award at a camp for handicapped children. Her name was called over the loud speaker and the girl next to her yelled into her hearing aid that she had won. She began to walk up front realizing that she was the only child not physically handicapped.
When all had calmed down, she began to feel distant from the other children and sorry for herself. She was ashamed of her type of handicap. Terry wanted a more visibly noticeable handicap. She felt like being deaf wasn't a real handicap. She began to feel very guilty during her time at the camp. Terry was able to do things that other children with worse handicaps couldn't. She later realized after living seventeen years of the normal life not to feel so guilty. She now knows that every handicap has its downs.
Most people with the handicap of being deaf are born with it or go deaf when they are babies. Terry lost her hearing over a period of time. At the age of twelve was when she really had the hardest times with her hearing. Although Terry is deaf she can talk and people can understand her. She learned to talk before she lost most of her hearing. Because Terry could talk normal and lip read, she passed herself as what we would call a "normal" person.
When her mother was seven months pregnant she had really bad kidney infections. Her mothers" doctors gave her too many antibiotics. Terry was then born two months later, assumed to be a healthy baby. Nobody realized that the antibiotics had harmed Terry's fetal nervous system.
It took until Terry was ten years old to realize that there was something very different and .
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wrong. She first noticed that everyone had begun to get blurry profiles and their speech seemed slurred and foreign to her. It took her teachers figuring out that something was wrong before anyone every really knew.