Fighting for little voices
Estelle Gerrett’s fight to give her deaf son a voice is helping generations of children find theirs, too
‘I knew what he should be doing in terms of play and interaction. Everything was normal – apart from his speech’
When Estelle Gerrett’s deaf son Nathan spoke his first clumsy sentence around the age of five, she promptly burst into tears. It wasn’t what he said – ‘moon hind cloud’ – but the fact that he’d strung three words together and said them at all that triggered her emotional response.
“It was the same when he was 20 and phoned me for the first time. I had to tell him it wasn’t the telephone making my voice sound weird; it was because I was crying,” laughs Estelle (65) from Buckinghamshire. In September she’s expecting to shed more tears at Nathan’s graduation when he qualifies as an audiologist – inspired by his mum’s passion to change lives for deaf children through specialist therapy.
To reach any of those milestones has been no easy feat for mother or son. Nathan had contracted meningitis around the time of his first birthday which had left him profoundly deaf. Back then, the family was living in Hong Kong, where Nathan’s late father, an Army Major, was stationed. When he became sick one night, Estelle instinctively knew something was seriously wrong. “There was something about it that really scared me and I became more and more anxious,” she recalls. By the time she got him to hospital around midnight, he was coughing up blood. Nevertheless, doctors were unconvinced. “One asked my husband: ‘Does your wife always get this anxious when the children are ill?’” she adds. When he told him it was out of character, he agreed to do a lumbar puncture which revealed that Nathan had developed bacterial meningitis. Though he was treated immediately, he was in a coma for a fortnight. Eventually showing signs of response, Estelle was allowed to take Nathan home three weeks after being admitted. “I was just grateful that he was still alive,” she recalls. But within 48 hours, Estelle realised that he wasn’t hearing her. “He wasn’t turning when I called his name and he became very distressed when I went out of the room,” recalls Estelle, a trained primary school teacher.
When doctors suspected the meningitis had left Nathan brain damaged, Estelle refused to accept it. But a later scan proved her right. “I knew my son and I wasn’t convinced by what they were saying. Being a teacher, I knew what he should be doing in terms of play and interaction. Everything was normal – apart from his speech,” she adds.
Back home, efforts to wake him by banging a metal spoon and saucepan failed and the decision was taken to move back to London with her family. At two, Nathan was diagnosed deaf in both ears at the city’s Royal National Hospital.
“He had no hearing at all in his left ear and only three per cent in his right ear. He was given a hearing aid but he still couldn’t access anything
like the sound levels of a hearing person. I was told he should be taught sign language to communicate. It was a devastating blow,” she admits.
Back in 1988, cochlear implants (medical devices using the body’s natural ability to send sound through the bone, bypassing damaged parts of the outer and middle ear, directly to the inner ear) weren’t being carried out in the UK and Estelle was told Nathan should be taught sign language as he’d never hear.
Once again, Estelle refused to take the advice at face value. “I was determined my son would speak! It wasn’t that I had anything against sign language at all but none of my family could sign and I felt that he would miss out,” she adds. Giving up work, Estelle began talking to Nathan constantly to teach him lip-reading skills and taught herself to sign. She also enrolled for an Open University course to become a teacher of the deaf. Her efforts paid off and by the time Nathan started mainstream school, he could lip-read and respond verbally. Excelling academically, he gained a grammar school place. Following a divorce, Estelle moved to New Zealand with her three children when Nathan was nine. There she began training and working as an audio verbal therapist focusing on developing the listening side of the brain. Through her work, she met a surgeon willing to carry out a cochlear implant on Nathan around the time of his 20th birthday. “For the first time, he was able to access sound and could hear alien noises such as birds singing and the washer bleeping!“However, Nathan’s brain needed to learn how to interpret the sounds. By now a qualified audio verbal therapist, Estelle spent every day with Nathan giving him intense therapy. After months of hard work, he was slowly able to understand speech hence the tearful telephone conversation.
Now back in the UK, she works for Auditory Verbal UK helping other deaf people in the same way and has no plans to retire. When she does, she will be happy in the knowledge that Nathan will continue her fight for little voices. “I know I made the right decision to fight!”