St. Bernard senior has learned to embrace her hearing loss
Montville — Tennis racket in hand, her braided hair swinging as she thwacked a volley from her opponent during a match last week, Kathryn McKinley looked every bit the confident, capable 18-year-old she is.
“She’s got her game face on now,” said Jennifer Feldman, who has coached Kathryn since she joined the St. Bernard School tennis team as a freshman. “She’s always been one of the strongest players on the team, very intellectually strong and athletically strong.”
Hardly winded after winning her match against the player from Lyman Memorial High School, Kathryn walked off the court to where her teammates, including her younger sister Anna, were waiting their turns, some snacking on Cheetos and ice tea, others catching up on math homework.
Her mother, Kathy Calnen, a regular at her daughters’ matches, recalled how life could have turned out very differently for Kathryn. Instead of graduating high school Friday as an honors student and preparing to leave the family home in Stonington for Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in the fall, her daughter could have been an outsider well behind her peers.
“She got lucky, getting flagged at birth,” Calnen said.
Shortly after Kathryn was born in 1996 at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital in New London, neurodiagnostic technicians there did a screening test — a relatively novel practice statewide at the time that is now the standard. She and her husband, Michael McKinley, learned then that their daughter had abnormal hearing. Further tests revealed a genetic condition had left her deaf.
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After equipping their daughter with hearing aids for the first two-and-a-half years, Calnen and her husband decided to have Kathryn surgically outfitted with a cochlear implant, an electronic medical device that stimulates the auditory nerve in the inner ear. At the time, the implants were still relatively new technology, and highly controversial within the deaf community.
“It was the dark ages of cochlear implants,” Calnen recalled.
But after watching a “60 Minutes” segment about a teenager with the implants, she and her husband were persuaded the device was right for their daughter.
Intensive auditory and speech therapy followed the first implant. At age 10, Kathryn had the surgery for a second implant.
“Her speech was significantly delayed, but she caught up quick,” her mother said. “We kept her in an auditory-rich environment, and within eight months of having the first implant her brain was wired for sound.”
Today, Kathryn said she doesn’t define herself as a deaf or disabled person, and doesn’t dwell on the fact that she wears implants. Often when meeting new people, she said, she prefers to wear her long hair down instead of pulled away from her ears and face, so the small plastic implants that surround her ears won’t become the focus of attention. But in familiar situations, she said, she loses all inhibition about them.
“For a long time I was very self-conscious about them, but I’ve learned to deal with it,” she said. “I’ve learned that it’s not what other people think about you that’s important, it’s what you think of yourself.”
In her classes, her teachers often use a headset with a microphone that enables her to hear better. Being in crowds can be difficult, and she may not hear someone yelling from a distance.
“But I don’t avoid doing anything, because I think of myself as a hearing person,” she said. “I can hear 90 percent of what everyone else can.”
In her essay for her college applications, Kathryn told how attending the Leadership Opportunities for Teens program offered by The Alexander Graham Bell Association for Listening and Spoken Language in Orlando, Fla., last summer taught her how to be comfortable talking about the implants and how they have helped her achieve her potential.
“I learned to embrace my hearing loss,” she wrote. “It was no longer a burden. I was freed.”
The implants, Kathryn said, are "something to be proud of."
"They've really benefitted me, because without them I wouldn't have had the opportunity to talk to other people and be social," she said.
At St. Bernard, Kathryn has distinguished herself as a hard-working student and leader. A member of the cross-country team, National Honor Society and Spanish National Honor Society, she helps tutor other students in Spanish.
In college, she plans to continue studying Spanish as a complement to a human services-related field she hopes to enter one day — perhaps becoming a guidance counselor. Excelling in a foreign language is unusual for someone with hearing loss, since the disability exempts them from second language requirements for graduation.
“I could have opted out, but I think it’s really important to learn another language, to push yourself,” Kathryn said.
Two years ago, her family hosted a visiting Spanish exchange student for two weeks. The student didn’t know much English, so Kathryn spoke to her mostly in Spanish.
Gisela Anagnostis has taught Kathryn in honors-level Spanish classes for the last two years. Kathryn’s warm personality and enthusiasm for learning about other cultures will suit her well in a human services profession, she said, especially as she becomes fully fluent in Spanish.
“She enjoys a challenge,” Anagnostis said. “She’ll do very well.”
One of Kathryn’s best friends, Sarah Ferraro of Salem, described her as a frank-speaking, strong-willed and bold young woman who has shed the embarrassment she sometimes showed about the implants and her disability when she was a freshman and now exudes self-acceptance.
“She’s someone you can trust wholeheartedly, who isn’t afraid to speak her mind,” Ferraro said.
j.benson@theday.com
Twitter: @BensonJudy
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