Surgery Day

This morning, we are embarking on a difficult moment in our family
journey. As we send this email, Amichai is being prepped for cochlear implant surgery. He will be under general anesthesia for the next five hours: one hour of prep, an hour and a half surgery on each ear, and an hour of 'mapping' (setting the levels of the implants) after surgery is complete.

We wanted to take this time to reflect with those that we love on what we have learned over these last four and a half months since we found out that Amichai is deaf. It is truly incredible to sit here today, at this particular marker on our journey, and realize how much we have
grown together through this experience, how much we have learned, the amazing people that we have added to our lives. We thought to mark this time by writing down some of these thoughts and understandings.

Amichai will always be deaf. We value his deafness as an identity and as a unique inheritance of a rich culture, a visual language and communal heritage. Just as we hope to imbue in our son a sense of his Jewish identity, because it is a part of him, so too do we hope to imbue in Amichai a sense of his deaf identity.

For our family, cochlear implantation is a gateway to a skill set. Amichai will grow up as a deaf person who can hear when he has his implants on. We value it just as we value the millions of other skill sets that we hope to teach him over his years under our roof. We give our children skills and we teach them resourcefulness, and when the
time comes, if we are wise and if we are strong, we let them go to
make choices on their own. Today, we are giving Amichai the resource of a cochlear implant. The skill of hearing with a cochlear implant is not achieved simply through this surgery; we will engage in the long term in continuous mapping of his implants as well as ongoing
intensive speech therapy. Over the coming years, we hope that he will become proficient in three languages (American Sign Language, Hebrew and English), and these languages will allow him access to all communities with which he may choose to be a part. Shayna and I are
becoming quickly proficient in American Sign Language in part so that Amichai will always know that he is free to flow between language modalities and communities, or even choose, without the risk of isolating himself from his family. There will be times in every day of his life when his implants will be off (when he sleeps, in the
water, etc), and during these times, we will never lose the ability to communicate with one another through language. Amichai will always be
deaf, and we respect his deafness, and it has quickly come to the heart of our family identity. We are blessed to be able to give him various resources to navigate the hearing and deaf worlds and to flow between them. We are blessed to know in our hearts that he will always have our support as he discovers and shapes his identity as a deaf person, and that as we continue to embark on this journey together, we will use both our hands and our mouths to grow and learn and develop as a family.

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