Hearing is something often taken for granted. The ability to hear the sound of nature, children playing, and music — it’s an unpromised gift. Jennifer Clark knows this all too well.
Clark and her husband began their journey of learning about what life is like for the hearing impaired while working at a Kroger grocery story together.
“They hired a couple of people that were deaf and were using sign language,” said Clark. “A while later, more deaf employees came on board, and Kroger brought in a representative from the Lighthouse For the Blind to help all employees learn sign language. They showed us some basic signs so we would be able to communicate with our coworkers.”
Clark says in hindsight, she sees their introduction to hearing impaired individuals as “a God thing” — “[He was] preparing us for when we got married and had a daughter that was deaf,” she explained.
The couple’s work with hard-of-hearing individuals came “full-circle” when their daughter failed her newborn hearing screening and was born with a cleft palate.
Doctors initially advised Clark that her daughter’s hearing issues were due to fluid in her cleft palate. After two surgeries to repair it, however, Clark noticed her daughter still had difficulty hearing.
At 3 years old, Clark’s daughter was fitted with hearing aids, but she continued to suffer from ear infections and fluctuating hearing loss; she would have up to twenty sets of tubes put in her ears over the next two years.
After years of no confirmed diagnosis and much frustration, it was her daughter’s first-grade teacher who finally referred Clark to Dr. B. Robert Peters and his private practice, the Dallas Ear Institute at Medical City Dallas.
“As soon as we walked in, [Dr. Peters] looked over all the notes, like, ‘Oh, this is classic EVA (Enlarged Vestibular Aqueducts) Syndrome,’ and he ordered an MRI,” she explained.
Dr. Peters additionally diagnosed Clark’s daughter with Pendred Syndrome, which he told Clark and her husband was partly responsible for their daughter’s fluctuating, progressive hearing loss. The couple finally felt relief at knowing the cause of her symptoms.
Their daughter had cochlear implants put in first her left and then her right ear, at ages 7 and 8, respectively.
“It was the best thing ever because she woke up every day knowing what her hearing was going to be. It was consistent. It was the same,” Clark said.
Dr. Peters served as Clark’s introduction to the Dallas Hearing Foundation, but the annual picnic fundraiser held by its Cochlear Implant Club was what ended up catalyzing her more-than-10-year career with the organization.
“They had a silent auction, and it looked like it could use some help, so I offered mine,” she said.
At the time, the Dallas Hearing Foundation was managed by one woman, who eventually disclosed to Clark that she was stepping down to care for a family member and asked Clark to take over. A year and a board vote later, Clark was the new manager for the Dallas Hearing Foundation.
Now, in its 25th year, the Dallas Hearing Foundation continues to help give people the gift of sound and speech with cochlear implants.
Clark and Dr. Peters, the man who finally diagnosed her daughter’s conditions, work with a specialized team consisting of an otologic surgeon, audiologist, speech-language pathologist, educational consultant, and psychologist to optimize each person’s potential to hear, speak, and obtain a higher quality education.
According to Clark, Dr. Peters started the foundation in 1997 because, at the time, cochlear implants for children were considered experimental and therefore were not covered by insurance.
Cochlear implants began to be recognized as standard treatment for severe-to-profound nerve deafness in 2004, and now more than 90% of all commercial health plans, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration, cover them.
Clark explains cochlear implants as tiny keyboards implanted behind the ear.
“When you have hearing loss, you get a hearing aid, which is like turning up the volume on a radio,” explains Clark. “Once you have the best hearing aids and they are turned up as high as possible and are still not giving off sound, it is probably time to talk about cochlear implants.”
According to Clark, “The cochlea looks like a [rolled-up] snail that, when unrolled, is like a piano with different tones and pitches. When the electrode of the cochlear implant is inserted into the cochlea, it electronically stimulates the cilia and hairs and passes the sound out [of the ear]. It is a mechanical way of stimulating hearing.”
After a patient undergoes the surgery to get the implant, which takes just an hour and a half, a waiting period ensues to allow the swelling to subside before the device can be activated. It is during the follow-up audiologist exam, when the patient gets an external magnetic processor put on the outside of the ear, that the magic begins.
“The sound is not instant,” says Clark. “The audiologist turns it on, and they stimulate sound, which is amazing to watch … they are helping you retrain your brain to be able to understand mechanical sound.”
Clark noted patients often say people sound strange at first, like a robot or Minnie Mouse, but the brain then adjusts and voices begin to sound normal.
“The process is gradual,” she said. “Some children react by crying because hearing a sound for the first time can be scary. You want to do it a little bit at a time when they first activate the kids; you do not want any big response.”
Helping international patients is one of the things Clark says is most rewarding about her position.
“Often in these international families, they do not even send kids to school with a hearing impairment. They train them to work the family business because there is no specialized school,” she said. “You appreciate [the access to healthcare in the U.S.] more when you realize how spoiled we are with the resources.”
She continued, “The international families hold a special place in my heart just because you see what a huge difference we can make, and they pay it forward — like this family that came in from Belize. We had some equipment donated to do hearing tests, so we trained them how to use it, and they [went back to Belize] and created a support group for parents.”
Cochlear implants also come with the gift of higher education. Texas offers people with cochlear implants a tuition waiver for any college or state university that allows them to get a degree up to a Ph.D.
The Dallas Hearing Foundation is working to strengthen the bridge to higher education and better career opportunities for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. In part, the foundation achieves this through initiatives that assist school districts and local police in educating the public about the needs of the deaf and hearing-impaired community.
“I grew up in Plano, and so Plano ISD has one of the best Special Ed. programs in the state. People move here to go there,” says Clark. “We work with a lot of the Deaf Ed. teachers, and we do presentations to them as well as the families just to let them know we are a resource. So if they get a diagnosis [and] have no idea what to do, they can call us, and we will kind of hold their hand and walk them through.”
The Dallas Hearing Foundation also loans hearing technology to local schools to help students learn without limitations.
“A lot of the kids we see have one foot in the hearing world and one in the deaf world,” says Clark, referring to the fact that some students use hearing technology at school but are entirely deaf once they leave.
Disagreements over using hearing technology versus using sign language have long been the subject of controversy, but Clark says the best advice she ever received was when she was told both worlds could coexist.
“There was a big divide. People said, Do not teach them sign language, they [do not] need to learn if they are going to be oral … they need not use that as a crutch,’ [while] some people may have a family that is five generations deaf and decide that they want to do ASL (American Sign Language),” Clark explained.
The Dallas Hearing Foundation supports a multi-faceted approach that lets families choose what approaches best suit them.
Clark cites the mantra of a group that the foundation collaborates with, Texas Hands & Voices, to explain the idea.
“Their motto was, ‘Whatever works for your family is what’s best for you — it is just a tool in [the] toolbox.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, so [you] just take out of the toolbox whatever it is you need.’ So that was some great advice to kind of not be so black and white, to just kind of go with whatever works,” Clark shared.
Through the foundation, Clark continues to seek new ways to help those with hearing loss. Another group she is passionate about helping is the elderly who deal with hearing loss later in life.
Clark noted that hearing aids can be expensive, and elderly people on Social Security often cannot afford them.
“I want to make sure that we get our older adults on fixed incomes [help],” she said.
A partnership between the Dallas Hearing Foundation and the Dallas Audiology Society has allowed its collaborators to do just that.
“[The society] is a network of audiologists in the DFW area who wanted to give back [to seniors]. They work with us and other senior sources in Dallas to do twice-a-year hearing screenings. If it looks like [someone] will need hearing aids, they fill out our forms, and once the board approves them, we come back and bring their hearing aids and program them,” Clark explained.
But providing services and equipment for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing is not cheap. Clark says the foundation is currently trying to increase its funds and now relies on refurbished hearing aids for elderly clients.
“[For] every dollar that goes into our foundation, ninety-five cents goes back into our programs, which is awesome because like cochlear implants, just for the device itself, it’s $30,000,” she said.
The Dallas Hearing Foundation funds its hearing programs, such as the one for the elderly, with their annual fundraiser, which was cancelled the past two years due to COVID-19.
However, Clark says their annual fundraiser for 2022 — which marks the Dallas Hearing Foundation’s 25th anniversary — will be happening this year. Besides raising much-needed funds, the event also seeks to bring the community together.
The 2022 Dallas Hearing Foundation gala will take place at the Frontiers of Flight Museum on November 5. Clark admits it does not draw the typical gala crowd and hopes people will come and get involved. She plans to take fundraising a step further this year and create pop-ups at local restaurants to rally community support.
“That is my job. I get to wake up and decide, ‘Well, that is an issue we need to tackle,’ and then we tackle it. I’m just passionate about it. So it never feels like work because I’m always learning new things that I can apply to everyday life and [with] people that I meet,” said Clark.