Deaf Girl Provides Lesson in Courage
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Caitlin Reel was just six months old when her mother knew something was wrong.
The baby did not respond to voices or sounds, not even a loud clap of the hands. The doctors told Luann Reel not to worry. Her baby was fine.
But the mother persisted, and when doctors finally tested Caitlin’s hearing a year later, they confirmed her fears.
Caitlin was living in a world of silence. She was profoundly deaf.
Flash forward ten years to last week at Shady Grove Elementary School in Ambler. The gymnasium was filled for the winter concert.
Music teacher Ryan Dankanich stepped to the microphone and told the audience they were about to hear “a very special violinist.” The only clue he gave that this student had made a particularly arduous journey here was when he said, “Make sure you applaud very loudly.”
And then out walked Caitlin, now 11, the deaf baby who never learned to give up. She lifted her violin to her chin and took a deep breath.
In the audience, Luann, the proud mom, stood poised with a video camera. Her hands were shaking.
“I was really worried,” she said later from the family’s home in Parkside in Delaware County. “She had crossed a lot of barriers to get here. I didn’t want something really unpleasant to come out of her violin.”
A Long, Hard Battle
What a long road it had been. From birth, her daughter had been misunderstood, stared at, whispered about, incorrectly labeled—even by a teacher—as mentally retarded.
Caitlin set out to prove them wrong. She learned sign language and the rudiments of speech. She received a cochlear implant, which allows her to hear some sound. A major accomplishment came last fall when she ordered a Big Mac and fries all on her own.
While her hearing brother, Jared, 9, walks two blocks to school, Caitlin must ride 45 minutes or more each way. The Perm Delco School District buses her to Shady Grove Elementary, which has a program for hearing-impaired students run by the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit.
Caitlin saw hearing students arriving with musical instruments and said she wanted to play, too. And so, despite all odds, she began violin lessons—the first deaf child at the school to attempt them.
“It’s taken a tremendous amount of concentration and perseverance on her part to get to this point,” said Melanie Stefanatos, Caitlin’s hearing-support teacher.
And last week’s concert was her chance to show the world.
The audience hushed. Caitlin drew the bow across the strings. And out came . . . music. Slow, sweet, and steady— and with rock-solid timing. She played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
Her mother fought back tears.
“I know she’s not playing Tchaikovsky,” Luann Reel, who is divorced, said. “But this is my deaf daughter—and she’s playing the violin.
An Incredible Feat
For most children, the brief performance would be just one of many Kodak moments on the road to adulthood. For Caitlin, it was a Herculean leap. To play this handful of notes, she had to overcome more obstacles than most of us will face in a lifetime.
As Dankanich, the music teacher, put it: “It’s just an incredible feat she’s been able to accomplish.”
Caitlin probably will not go on to become a famous musician. She doesn’t need to. The violin already has taught her about courage and perseverance and faith.
A girl without hearing tackled an instrument that has everything to do with hearing, and she didn’t give up. For the determined, she learned, even the steepest mountains can be scaled, one step at a time.
Her performance over, Caitlin hurried off the stage. Principal Beth Pearson told the 500-member audience the truth about Caitlin—that she was one of the school’s seven deaf children.
The audience roared its approval—loudly enough, in fact, that Caitlin could hear the clapping through her cochlear implant.
Backstage she signed to her mother: “I’m so happy. They were clapping for me. They were clapping for me.”
