He lives in two worlds

In the midst of a language lesson, the deaf Vacaville boy looks up with alarm and grabs the special transmitter on the side of his head.

"I can't hear," says 9-year-old Joey Marchand, indicating the spot where a device was implanted in 2001 to help him hear. "Going booo, booo."

At his teacher's urging, Joey gets back on task, relying only on sign language.

That easy transition between two worlds – the hearing and the deaf – was not what Joey's parents expected when they anguished over the controversial cochlear implant.

"I just want my son to talk," his father, Emile Marchand, said when Joey was 2. "I want him to be in the hearing world."

Going back to document Joey's progress in the years since his implant at UC Davis Medical Center, The Bee found a happy boy who does talk, sometimes incessantly though not always clearly.

But in the spacious special education classroom, as dying batteries left Joey without sound, the value of straddling the two worlds is completely clear.

"What does it mean, 'compound?' " teacher Alicia O'Leary asks him in speech and sign language, pointing to words like raincoat, cookbook and snowman.

"Two words," Joey responds, holding up two fingers.

Being able to use both modes of communication doesn't just come in handy when something goes wrong with the implant. Experts say it also allows deaf children to access the deeper meanings of the world around them, which could increase their future academic options.

"The goal is not just to get them graduated and onto Social Security (Disability Insurance), but to make them healthy and happy adults," said Richard Horrell-Schmitz, who teaches deaf and hard-of-hearing children at Joey's school.

After years of wanting Joey to rely primarily on his implant for hearing and speech, Joey's parents now see benefits in the dual approach.

"I realized, what good is speech without language?" said Joey's mother, Christina Marchand. "If you can say everything perfectly but you can't understand what you are saying, there is no use in saying it."

When Joey received his cochlear implant, he joined about 32,000 deaf people with implants worldwide, about half of them children. At the time, the technology deeply divided the deaf community, with many characterizing the invasive procedure as an attempt to "fix" deafness.

Although the subject remains controversial, acceptance of the device has grown along with its use. Today, more than 50,000 people have been implanted. Among children with the implants, the vast majority, like Joey, have hearing parents.

Cochlear implants stimulate the hearing nerve, which then fires off electrical impulses that the brain interprets as pitch and loudness. It takes months of training to make sense of those impulses, which people who became deaf later in life say sound robotic, like Darth Vader.

Still, the implants are not a cure for deafness. Dead batteries or lost pieces from the processing apparatus worn on the outside of the body can render the device ineffective, and most implants can't be used during rigorous sports.

When Joey practices with his swim team, he dives into the water minus the fanny pack that carries the processor and without the headpiece that receives the processor's coded signals.

Instead, he watches his coach, who does his own version of sign language to indicate which stroke Joey should swim.

Profoundly deaf at birth, Joey lost nearly three important years of speech and language development before his surgery. While his hearing sister, Chloe, now 11, was hitting regular developmental milestones, Joey knew only a few rudimentary hand signals and tended to express himself with grunts and crying fits.

Now 9, Joey attends Fairfield's Cordelia Hills Elementary for a special program operated by the Solano County Office of Education. His class has six deaf or hard-of-hearing students at various grade levels. Four use hearing aids; Joey and one other student have implants.

Cordelia's approach is not purely oral education, where children are trained to rely completely on their mechanically enhanced hearing. Nor does it represent the more traditional approach, where speech is eschewed in favor of sign language and immersion in deaf culture.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Dorsey Griffith, (916) 321-1089.