Life Lessons for a Young Schoolteacher: Adjusting to hearing loss was only the first obstacle to
Lori messing was a freshman at Drew University in Madison, N.J., when the hearing in both of her ears suddenly plummeted. Even though she had struggled with hearing loss for years, Messing had never experienced this degree of deafness. "I spent all of my adolescence and high school years very ill with debilitating arthritis, rashes, swollen knees, hearing loss, and other painful symptoms," says Messing, whose doctors treated her with steroids for years.
Her parents believed she had Lyme disease, which is caused by the bite of an infected tick, and needed antibiotics. One evening eight years earlier, something had bitten Messing's hand on the Fourth of July. After the incident at college, Messing's parents took her to the Lahey Clinic near Boston, where she was seen by a hematologist. The doctor who would treat Messing for the next decade confirmed that she had been infected with Lyme.
First Hearing Aids
Messing began wearing her first hearing aids in college. However, her ability to hear fluctuated from periods of near-perfection to utter losssometimes from hour to hour.
"It was not unusual for me to wake up with hearing, only to have it be gone by the evening," Messing says. "I was able to hear the speaker at my graduation at Drew, but a week later, I became completely deaf again so that I could not even hear while wearing a hearing aid." One day in May 2003, Messing woke up completely deaf. Messing believes that her hearing loss was probably caused by the Lyme disease. It may also have been caused by the serious autoimmune disease she exhibited years later. Regardless of how it occurred, it was a new, frightening event.
An Eagerness to Get On With It
In 1999, shortly after graduating from college, Messing discovered an organization called ALDA, the Association of Late-Deafened Adults, based in Rockford, Ill. Amazed to learn she wasn't alone in her hearing loss, Messing contacted the managing editor of the ALDA News, a quarterly newsletter, and wrangled an assistant editor job on the spot. While she mostly worked from home, she attended her first ALDAcon in Alexandria, Va., that year and has been going back to the annual conference ever since. "ALDA taught me everything I know about standing up for my rights as a deaf person,"
Messing believes that her hearing loss was probably caused by the Lyme disease. It may also have been caused by the serious autoimmune disease she exhibited years later. Regardless of how it occurred, it was a new, frightening event.
An Eagerness to Get On With It
In 1999, shortly after graduating from college, Messing discovered an organization called ALDA, the Association of Late-Deafened Adults, based in Rockford, Ill. Amazed to learn she wasn't alone in her hearing loss, Messing contacted the managing editor of the ALDA News, a quarterly newsletter, and wrangled an assistant editor job on the spot. While she mostly worked from home, she attended her first ALDAcon in Alexandria, Va., that year and has been going back to the annual conference ever since.
"ALDA taught me everything I know about standing up for my rights as a deaf person," Messing says. "My friends there renewed my sense of confidence, self-worth, and independence, and really got me to embrace the world again." Elinore Bullick, the former editor of the New Jersey ALDA chapter's newsletter, met Lori 11 years ago.
"There she was, a young woman just out of college with her whole life before hernewly deafened and trying to make the best of it," Bullick says. "I saw no trace of self-pity or defeat in the face of this devastating loss, just an eagerness to get on with it."
Messing had been deaf for two years before receiving a cochlear implant in her right ear. She credits her implant with enabling her to become a sixth-grade teacher and to lead a classroom full of hearing students in a public school.
"My CI made me very gutsy and I really threw myself into activities that I would have shied away from before it," she says. "Despite my degree and honors from Drew University, I was never able to get a job as a deaf person."
Her first year teaching was at a school for the deaf and hard of hearing, where she was a paraprofessional in a fourth-grade classroom. Frustrated with what she calls the "learned helplessness" perpetuated by the teachers who would talk or sign in front of the students about the students' disabilities, Messing eventually moved on to Edison Middle School in West Orange, N.J., where she taught reading full-time.
The struggles of deaf and hard of hearing students in mainstream classrooms are well documented. Messing's situation was reversed: a deaf teacher of hearing students.
"The most challenging part of teaching was standing in front of the classroom and asking questions and hearing the students' responses," Messing says.
"I constantly had to be up and walking around, moving to a student when he or she raised a hand to talk. Even then, I didn't always understand their answer and it was sometimes embarrassing."
After a year of teaching, Messing was given a teacher's aide to help her in the classroom, and she began to find her stride.
In May 2007, she married Jacob "Jay" Messing, in a ceremony that utilized a sign language interpreter and CART (Computer Assisted Realtime Translation). Jay Messing proposed to his Disney-fanatic girlfriend in front of Mickey Mouse, and naturally the newlyweds returned to Disney World for their honeymoon.
At the start of Messing's third year in the classroom, the schoolteacher was up for tenure at Edison and her new husband had just begun his medical residency in New York City. But in October 2007, she suddenly fell ill.
A Rare Diagnosis
A specialist diagnosed relapsing polychondritis (RP), a very rare autoimmune disease that attacks cartilaginous areas of the body, such as the ears and nose, andin rare instances like Messing'sthe heart. Multiple tests confirmed that all of Messing's coronary arteries were 95 percent blocked and her aorta severely inflamed.
"It was at this time that I started to think of my hearing loss as my favorite affliction," Messing says. "In retrospect, it was the easiest thing I'd been through."
Doctors performed several complicated operations, including a quadruple bypass and aortic root and valve replacement surgery.
After a few weeks of progress, she suffered a Type II aortic dissection, or aneurysm. Although death is the most common outcome from a dissection, her blood miraculously rerouted itself and she survived.
But the news she received afterward was grim: The 32-year-old schoolteacher would be permanently disabled. Her doctors warned against sparking another aneurysm or episode, which ruled out holding a regular job.
"When I lost my hearing, it is true that I felt like a part of me died, but with my heart problem, I've had to come to terms with actual death and my mortality," she says.
"I am not sure if I have fully embraced that."
New Challenges
Life is certainly different now for Messing. She needs a great deal of rest and has appointments to see her doctors several times a week. She and Jay, a psychiatrist, discuss their options for raising a family and work to keep lines of communication open between them as they adjust to the situation.
Messing spends time with her hearing dog, a Shih-Tzu named Dolly, and stays connected with ALDA. She edits the New Jersey ALDA chapter's newsletter, and is an entertainment co-chair for ALDAcon 2011, which will be held in Indianapolis.
Despite being unable to lead a classroom conventionally, Messing still considers herself a teacher. "I used to wonder why I lost my hearing. When I began to use my
experiences to reach out to other people with hearing loss, I knew I had discovered a larger purpose for my life. I may still be in the process of finding a similar reason for my heart condition.
"Deafness taught me it's not impossible to live with a disability. It just calls for more creativity. This lesson is serving me well as I learn to live anew with a different set of restrictions," she says.
"Long ago, I discovered that a happy deaf person is not an oxymoron, and now with each passing day I'm learning that a weak heart can also be strong and listen just as well."
Amy Gross is a staff writer.
