She gains her freedom from the sounds of silence

A childhood accident took her hearing. A determined son and daughter helped return it.

Using sign language, Yolanda Willey says she was about 5 years old when she fell at home. Her memory of the incident is a bit fuzzy — it happened more than 50 years ago — but she recalls blood in her ear and a trip to the hospital.

Through her teenage years, Yolanda was unable to hear or speak. Her challenges only increased as an adult. 

Raising two children with a husband who also was deaf wasn’t easy. Neither was battling breast cancer or seeing her family struggle financially.

But a fighting spirit displayed by Yolanda, her husband, John Sr., daughter, Kathy, and son, John, prevailed.

Today, 57-year-old Yolanda knows what it’s like to hear again: her children’s voices, her dog’s barking, visitors knocking on her door.

The family’s story is one of hard work, determination and love, as well as a lifelong desire to feel normal in a world that often stigmatizes the deaf.

In the beginning

After losing her hearing, Yolanda — an only child — struggled to communicate with her parents, who often spoke Spanish in their Corpus Christi home.

When people talked to her, Yolanda wanted them to slow down so she could try to read their lips and understand what they were saying.

She used hearing aids without much luck. In those days, the clunky devices offered little benefit. So around age 12, it was decided that Yolanda would attend Texas School for the Deaf in Austin.

“She didn’t want to go, and her mom wanted her to stay. It was her stepfather who forced her to go,” says her son, John.

Yolanda stayed at the school until she was 18. The experience allowed her to gain an education in a supportive environment with other boys and girls like her.

When she moved back home, she was armed with a proficiency in sign language.

Dating, then marriage

When she was about 24, Yolanda met the man who would become her husband. 

John Willey Sr. was born deaf. He used hearing aids and learned to speak while growing up among family and friends in Port Aransas.

Yolanda and John were attending a church service when they first interacted. Later at a friend’s home, they enjoyed pizza and visited using sign language.

“My dad kept scooting over to sit by my mom, and everybody was looking,” her son says.

After several years of dating, the couple married in 1989.

Kathy was born in 1990 and John followed two years later. Their parents were relieved when they realized both children could hear. 

But communication in the Willey home was far from simple, even after John Sr. had Cochlear implant surgery in 1995 to improve his hearing.

“When my sister and I were very young, we would hit the ground to get our parents’ attention. Or we would be on the couch and throw our hands up. We just figured out ways to communicate with them,” John says.

Before learning to speak, the siblings were taught sign language by their parents. The main words were mama, dad, hungry and milk. 

After moving from Corpus Christi to Anahuac in the late 1990s, the kids’ speech started to take off as they were around more relatives and began going to school.

As John got older, school presented its own set of challenges.

“There were bullies in junior high and high school. If I remember correctly, I got into 13 fights. The majority of them were because someone was making fun of my parents. My mom was a custodian for Anahuac ISD, and kids would imitate her,” he says.

“Eventually, I learned some self-discipline. I realized that if I continued hitting people I got mad at, it had consequences that could affect my future.”

Down and out

As Yolanda and her husband struggled to find and keep jobs, they were dealt a blow in 2009 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. 

“It was so scary because with something like cancer, we didn’t know which way things would go,” John says.

Kathy and John took turns driving with their mom and dad back and forth to Baytown for chemotherapy and other appointments. After several years of treatments, Yolanda had survived the disease.

“During that time, my dad couldn’t find a job. Then everything at home seemed to go out: the fridge, the dryer, the AC in the living room,” John says. “When you talk about living in poverty, we went way beyond it. That was the hardest time in our lives.”

Realizing they needed to step up to help the family, John and Kathy got grocery store jobs while attending high school.

After Kathy graduated, John continued working at the store, trying to save money to attend college. His dream was to become a firefighter. 

John got the bug when he was about 16, and he was proud to be a junior member of the Anahuac Volunteer Fire Department. After high school, he decided to attend the Firefighter Training Academy at San Jacinto College.

There were some financial roadblocks along the way. But John kept working and his sister helped out when she could. Also, he received a student aid grant that helped him complete the program.

“When I finished and got my certifications, it was the biggest accomplishment of my life,” John says. 

After serving with Anahuac EMS and Cloverleaf Fire Department, John joined Galena Park Fire Department. He recently was promoted to captain.

Financial stability

Having a steady job and salary was important to John, especially as he reflected on his family’s hard times.

“It showed me that anything can happen. You can lose everything. I didn’t want to get back to that rock bottom place ever again,” he says.

To give himself a solid foundation, John purchased a small house. It’s just down the street from his parents’ home, on the same block the family has lived since they moved to Anahuac.

With his own house and other necessities of life in place — plus, his father was set working two custodial jobs at hospitals in Houston — John addressed the one thing that continued to bother him.

“I remember sitting down with my mom one day. I was tearing up. I felt so bad for her. She couldn’t hear anything, and I always had that memory of my sister and I having to beat on the ground to get her attention. I was like, when will we ever be able to holler and she will turn to look at us?” John says.

“Kathy and I talked about how we needed to get mom some hearing aids. She had already been through cancer. We didn’t want her to go the rest of her life without being able to hear us talk.”

The first hearing center they went to didn’t offer much hope. Getting a Cochlear implant was probably out of the question because of Yolanda’s health issues. And the expensive hearing aids the center suggested held no guarantee of helping. 

They applied for a grant to help offset the cost, but the request was denied.

One last hope

Despite a growing sense of defeat, John decided to take his mom to one more hearing center. That’s where they met Ray Covey, a hearing health care practitioner who was born with a severe hearing loss.

“I told him that she’s not just hard of hearing, she’s completely deaf,” John recalls of their 2017 visit to New Sound Hearing Centers in Baytown. “I really didn’t think he could help her. But he said, ‘Miracles can happen.’”

In John’s mind, that’s exactly what occurred.

“He put her in the booth to test her, and once he adjusted everything he said, ‘OK, can you hear me?’ And she had this big smile on her face as she looked right at me. I about cried,” John says.

Ray, who has benefited from wearing hearing aids his entire life, says that while Yolanda is legally deaf, ‘With the hearing aids, I was able to get her some loudness and some understanding.”

When John was presented with the option of purchasing one hearing aid then and the other later, when it might be more affordable, he decided to go all in.

“I was just about to pay off my home, so I wasn’t really prepared to buy everything right then and there. But when I looked at my mom and thought about all that she has gone through, I decided to go for it. I think we bought the baddest, top-of-the-line hearing aids you can find,” John says.

And the results have been life-changing.

After they returned to see Ray to have the hearing aids fitted, John needed to stop by the bank on the way home. To his surprise, after engaging his truck’s turn signal to use the ATM, his mom communicated that she could hear the ticking sound.

“That really surprised me. Because a long time ago when she had some old hearing aids, they really didn’t do anything for her. It was like a big old megaphone, and the sounds would hurt her ears. She could never hear little things like this.”

Yolanda is thrilled not only to hear when family members call out to her, but also the simple things in life.

“In the past when you’d knock on her door, she wouldn’t answer. You’d have to beat on the door or stomp on the porch to make vibrations that she could feel. Now she can hear it,” John says.

“Now she can hear the dog bark. She can hear cars drive by. She can hear kids yelling and playing. She can hear people talking. She can hear everyday sounds. It’s amazing. She’s really happy, which makes all of us happy.”

Related:

• He was destined to help other people hear better
• Social distancing can be heart-breaking