I can relate to Thomas Jefferson’s warning that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. You need only look as far as the recent headlines about Miss Deaf Texas, killed by a train as she was distracted by text messaging while crossing some railroad tracks, to see why I regard hyper-vigilance as the price of my independence as a hard-of-hearing person. Yesterday, when my son and I crossed the street at a relatively quiet intersection in Boston, I realized how hyper-alertness has become an unconscious habit for me — the only way to assure security in what too often is a physically dangerous everyday world for someone who can’t hear. It can literally save your life.
At the Boston intersection, Jake and I had a “Walk Sign” and started ambling across the street, but unlike my normal-hearing son, I reflexively took a long look left and right up and down what we had assumed was an empty boulevard. A few hundred yards to the south I saw an ambulance bearing down on us at what seemed to be about 70 miles an hour. It had its flashing lights on but hadn’t sounded the siren yet. My son hadn’t seen it yet, but I grabbed his arm and made him look as I started hustling out of the way. In the next instant the ambulance driver saw us and hit the siren, but by that time we were already well on our way to the other curb. Jake most likely would have heard the siren in time to get out of the way, but if I had been by myself and hadn’t looked, I wouldn’t have seen or heard, and the ambulance driver would have had to veer into oncoming cars or hit me. Instead, I looked even before my son or the ambulance driver were aware of a possible problem — I was hyper-vigilant.
I realized I live this way, whether I’m driving a car, leaving a kettle on the stove, or walking across the tracks at the light-rail station near my home. People who hear well don’t hve to give a second thought to such situations, but for hard-of-hearing people each is inherently dangerous, requiring constant vigilance and anticipation. Skipping onto the curb as the ambulance whizzed by, I thought about the times I’ve gotten lost in my own handheld text messaging communicator and wondered how often I’d been oblivious to very real danger. It gave me a chill.
The headlines about Miss Deaf Texas are hair-raising in another very literal sense as well. Have you ever been to London? Often, the first time you cross the street, you find yourself looking to the left, and when you see no oncoming cars, you step off the curb and nearly get hit by a car bearing down on you from the other “wrong” side of the road. The adrenalin surge you get from such a life-threatening experience is enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck. When you’re out and about as a hard-of-hearing person, you are hyper-alert all the time, and your adrenalin response is on a hair-trigger, firing away repeatedly at the least hint of trouble. Scientists call this an instinctive fight-or-flight response, and while it probably extended the lives of cavemen running from mastadons, it can shorten your life when you’re in a modern city and your adrenalin runs amok a dozen times a day. I think that’s one of the many reasons hard-of-hearing people get real tired and often need to crash when everyone around them is going strong. What a bummer. But it’s a small price to pay for my freedom, and it sure beats the alternative. Just remember what Patrick Henry said: “Give me liberty, or give me death.”