Figured I’d start writing about my experiences getting hurt and dealing with hospitals/doctors as a Deaf person. I’m rather experienced in this subject as… yeah, I get hurt often! So with this said, I would like to take a minute, sit back, and tell you the tale of how I flew like SuperMan and screwed up my landing.

June 22nd, 1996 – approximately 1pm ET, Bethany Beach, Delaware…

My family planned on going to Bethany Beach for about a week or so, as we almost always did every summer. This year, my brother and I were allowed to have a friend go with us. I invited Dave to join us, and I’m grateful he was my friend – he has excellent street smarts and survival skills. First day there, we got up and decided to go to McD’s before going to the beach. I rode dad’s bike, while he used my bike. Of course like teenagers, we raced each other – unbeknownst to us, Jared – some random hearing kid who was newly licensed – was speeding and not paying attention to the road, ended up hitting me (Dave was in front of me and just turned into the shoulder, while I was about 3′ outside of the crosswalk) and sent me flying about 42′ (all this I got from the police report – I have no memory of this incident). I wasn’t wearing a helmet, and ended up hitting the road headfirst. Dave and other witnesses saw me tumble, he raced to me and checked on me – I was, obviously, in shock and he helped me settle down, managed to get a lady to pull over while she was driving with one of those brick cell phones, and got her to call for emergency services.

I ended up getting airlifted to Salisbury, MD. Now, this is where things get messed up – all because I’m Deaf.

From what I was told by my parents and doctor, I was awake and ‘functional’ from when I was hit to the time I arrived at the hospital. I interacted with nurses and doctors via paper/pen. Now, bear in mind – I had college level reading/writing at this age (15) already, and while spelling isn’t my strongest suit… I can write extremely well. Apparently, they were about to release me with a clean bill of health – no broken bones, couple scrapes/road rashes. Fortunately, my parents were well aware of my reading/writing skills, and most especially fortunate for me that I used Signed Exact English/SimCom not American Sign Language – my parents were able to notice that I was not making sense, my grammar was off. “Oh, that’s normal, he’s deaf…” said the dumb doctor. Just cause my ears don’t work, don’t mean my brain doesn’t. Kathy ended up arguing w the doctor and demanded a MRI (she had some training as an EMT volunteer, so she knew that something was amiss in my head), to which the doctor relented and… lo and behold, I was bleeding in my head! Emergency brain surgery – they shaved my head, cut a flap of skin, broke my skull (mind you, the car and asphalt didn’t break my skull – the doctor did!) to drain the bleeding, stopped the bleed, screwed my skull back together and gave me 62-63 staples. I woke up the next day but was extremely in/out of it – wasn’t til the 2nd day after surgery that I started retaining memory and… welp, yeah, I got hit by a car. w00t. The entire time I was there, the doctors and nurses were nice to me, I didn’t personally have any issues with them…

’til years later, when I started looking into my accident, asked for all reports and semi-interrogated my best friend and Kathy about what happened and learned…

…not only did a newly licensed driver nearly kill me, so did the doctor. Simply because he thought deaf == dumb. Simply because he thought all d/Deaf people could not write proper English. The only thing going for me was Kathy’s EMT training and knowing that I had good English reading/writing skills. If not for that, I would have died after leaving the hospital, all based on a dumb doctor’s ignorance, and the narrow-minded focus of medical professionals when it comes to deafness.

The older I grew, the more I knew – to get decent medical services, there will be more times than not where I will have to engage asshole mode and demand accessibility – and if denied, raise holy motherfucking hell, because this shit should not happen!

It’s fucking 2024, y’all’s…