Pushing On: Student Navigates College With Hearing Loss

Two-year-old C.J. Suss runs and hides from his mother, while they’re playing a game of hide-and-seek.  She finds C.J. facing a glass door with his back turned to her.

“C.J.!  C.J.!” she yells from five feet away.

He doesn’t turn around.  He doesn’t hear her.

The doctor diagnoses two-year-old C.J. with Bilateral Hearing Loss.  This means he has 13 percent hearing in his right ear and 40 percent hearing in his left ear.  At two years old, C.J. begins wearing hearing aids.

Sixteen years after the diagnosis, C.J. still wears hearing aids as he moves from Long Island, New York to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia as a freshman management major.                  

When C.J. entered middle school, his hearing loss became more apparent. C.J. had typical concerns entering middle school: “Can I open my locker, can I get to class on time?” he wondered. But C.J. also worried about sharing his impairment with more people.

Starting his first year at JMU, C.J. faces a new set of concerns: meeting new people, navigating campus, and getting to class on time.

“The social aspect and the academic, I can’t focus on the disability part of it and hold me back,” C.J. explains. 

But sometimes the disability strains the social aspect of his life. 

In the past December, C.J. was having dinner with a group of friends in Bella Luna, a local Harrisonburg restaurant.  He sat at the end of the table, his friends to his right, the rest of the restaurant to his left. 

The sounds of clanging of silverware against ceramic plates and conversations between families over dinner filled the restaurant. Unable to hear and participate in the conversation, C.J. ate his food, zoned out, and wished he was sitting at the middle of the table.

The classroom is another place where it’s easy for C.J. to zone out.  To combat this, C.J. gives an auditory amplifying necklace to his professors so that the voice of his professor can go directly to his hearing aids.  However the hearing aids are not perfect. While they pick up sounds C.J. wants to hear, they also pick up all other noises around him. 

All sounds combine and interlock within the hearing aids. 

 C.J. might be listening to the professor and receiving the sound, but if students whisper to each other during the lecture, these side-conversations overpower the professor.  “It can be a little much at times…it can cause a lot of anger,” C.J. said, because he can’t pick and choose what he hears.

C.J. dreads approaching his professors with the auditory necklace every first class of the semester.  When he gives the necklace right before class starts, the rest of the class stare at him. He avoids meeting their gazes as he sits back down. 

One professor took that feeling of dread away on the first day of class his first semester.  Dr. Julie Gochenour was C.J.’s professor for individual presentations, a class that every JMU student takes where they’re required to give three graded speeches a semester.

Dr. Gochenour remembers when C.J. approached her on the first day with the auditory amplifying necklace.  It was 5:00 p.m.; she knew it was his last class of the day. 

“I’m sure C.J. had already done it a number of times and had to explain it one, more, time.  That was the look I think I saw on his face,” Dr. Gochenour recalls.

Dr. Gochenour saw that C.J. has to be different because he constantly has to adapt to his environment to fit his needs.  She didn’t want him to feel this difference in her class. 

C.J. could hear Dr. Gochenour when she wore the necklace, however he couldn’t always hear his classmates. If a student made a pun, Dr. Gochenour might have responded, “Oh so-and-so that was a great pun! I never would’ve thought of comparing X to Y!”

“I guess it was a matter of understanding that he has a handicap but not a matter of understanding that he’s handicapped…the handicap didn’t make him handicapped,” Dr. Gochenour explains.

C.J.’s close group of friends also make him feel comfortable transitioning and at home in college.  They tell him that they don’t think of him as hearing impaired.

 “It’s definitely something that makes me much happier that I am more than just someone who wears these hearing aids,” C.J. responds. 

C.J. lives on Floor Four of his dorm, also known as the loud floor.  C.J. feels that he fits in there perfectly, he’s loud himself.  He and his friends tell each other everything, they laugh a lot, they sit up late in the hallways talking and doing homework together.

While C.J. might be loud, his friends know he’s upset if he gets quiet.  For C.J. to confide in people, he feels he needs to have a deep friendship with them. 

JMU freshman and Biology major Nicole Bellocco is one of those friends that he knows he can confide in. 

Nicole and C.J. have attended school together since elementary school, but the two didn’t become close until 8th grade.  They visited JMU together, they left Long Island to attend school at JMU, they live in the same dorm, and they both miss home.  While they’re far from home, the two look out for each other.

“It’s like that special blanket or stuffed animal, but alive and that’s priceless,” he recalls.

C.J. will return to JMU as a health services administration major in the fall of 2017.  He sometimes gets frustrated asking people to repeat what they said. But he anticipates this to be a life-long task and refuses to let it restrict him from pursuing his dreams.