The Secret Deafie: Facing a family crisis when you’re deaf

The Secret Deafie is a regular column about deaf experiences submitted anonymously by different contributors. Read past articles here. If you have a story you’d like to tell, just email thelimpingchicken@gmail.com

You’re on holiday, on a magical Scottish island. You are with your companion, X.

Your phone, lying on the sofa, goes. You pick it up and glance at it. It’s your brother. You know, you absolutely know, that he would never call you on holiday with good news or for a chat.

You also know your father was diagnosed with a ‘low-grade’ brain tumour weeks earlier. You know the thing has been growing faster than anyone would like. There was an appointment this week, but you’ve heard nothing.

You can’t phone for news and, now, you can’t answer the phone without help. Already, keeping in touch in recent weeks via email and text message has felt strained and woefully insufficient. 

You also know there is no computer screen for video calls in the cottage, and that your phone screen is too idiotically cracked to be much use. Maybe X’s phone? 

But he is already stepping in, placing himself in the unhappy position of conveying a brutal phone call. Not only is the tumour not so benign after all, it is inoperable. (They don’t like, it seems, to use the word ‘terminal’ these days.) 

You stand there, shaking uncontrollably, face wet, catching snatches as you clutch at X. 

“…Maybe … months … Christmas … radiotherapy… nurse … spoke … I visited …. Prepare ourselves … raw and emotional … support.” 

“I will look after (Secret Deafie’s name),” X tells your brother, and hangs up. 

X has stood, listening, looking at you, stroking you the whole time and relays those parts of the conversation you’ve missed. You don’t know what to do.

It’s Thursday night and you’re leaving Saturday morning, so going home one day early seems pointless. Do you need to wait for a while before texting anyone, let the news sink in a bit? 

Somehow, you make some food and get through the rest of the evening, even though you don’t sleep. But you’re grateful for the presence of X, slumbering peacefully beside you.

You go for a walk the next, final day and take a last, lingering look at the jaw-dropping scenery, because you can’t sit around indoors. 

You say goodbye to X at a station, back on the mainland. He has another holiday to travel on to. He has offered to return with you, but you have insisted there’s no need.

Shortly after Preston, on the long journey south, a woman shrieks at you, as you bumble with your suitcase in the aisle. Evidently, you haven’t heard her earlier requests to get out of the way, or spotted her children running on, unattended. 

She is screaming, more loudly than would generally be considered strictly fair. So loudly that it’s easy to hear. It adds to the stress. (You have now had two nights on the trot with next to no sleep, having got up at 6am to pack up and leave the accommodation. You are beyond exhaustion.) So you start to cry, embarrassingly publicly, and everyone in the carriage thinks it’s all about the irate mum. 

Next morning, back home, you can at last do a video call and lipread your brother. The full horror of what has happened, what will happen, slowly dawn. You’re both in tears. 

As the days roll by, it will be your brother who can call the oncology nurse, who can phone to help make arrangements for patient transport for the radiotherapy that will give one, slim chance of a little more, longed-for extra time. (Just a little. Please, anything.)

It will be he who can attend the next appointment with your dad and catch every word, as you all try and make sense of the next steps. You will then listen, straining for every sound, as he explains the conversation afterwards, repeating anything you’ve missed. You feel completely helpless. 

And when you get to visit your parents, you will all be in tears. You haven’t seen your father cry before. But he does the minute you walk into the conservatory, where is lying on a sun lounger, legs elevated as though he’s in a dentist’s chair, a jaunty hat incongruously on his head. 

There are shudders and gasps as he speaks, the utterances lost on the air. But perhaps not hearing what he is trying to say doesn’t matter. Perhaps, now, all you can do is hold him. You can’t tell him that everything will be OK, when it clearly won’t.

All you can do is tell him, through your own sobs, that you and your brother are there, and that you both love him. And know that he has heard.