By Rita McInerney

Chrissie Eckles is an outgoing young woman who sees herself as part of two different worlds, the world of the hearing and the world of the deaf. “I’m lucky I can share with both worlds.”

Luck has had very little to do with the fact that Chrissie, who will be 21 next month, has just completed her sophomore year at Emory where she is majoring in biology and maintains a B average. Her struggle to overcome the handicap of silence is a day to day one. The Marietta coed has been profoundly deaf since her birth.

Her mother, Barbara Eckle, elected not to have an abortion after contracting German measles in her third month of pregnancy with Chrissie in 1963. Because of the danger of the rubella strain of measles to the unborn, abortions were permitted for women exposed to them if two doctors consented. The Eckles did not go for the abortion. The couple, natives of Jamaica, were living in New York City at the time. They now live in Marietta where they are parishioners at St. Ann’s Church.

When Chrissie was born the doctors gave her a clean bill of health. It was not until months later that Barbara and Winston Eckle realized that their baby girl was not responding to sounds.

After three months of testing, a medical team at St. Luke’s Hospital Center in New York diagnosed Chris as moderately deaf, a short time later revising the hearing loss to profound. The Eckles began the awesome task of motivating their daughter. Through auditory stimulation and training they were determined that Chris would learn to use her 10 percent residual hearing to develop speech.

Though saddened by the handicap their daughter had been born with, they began, with the help of a young and enthusiastic audiologist, their long and painstaking effort. At the time they did not know that only from five to 10 percent of all children born deaf develop intelligible speech.

The Eckles learned to be firm and patient when Chrissie rejected her hearing aid and even tried to take it apart. The strange device had changed their little girl’s silent world into a noisy one where none of the sounds had meaning to her. Their concentration was on talking, every situation an opportunity for Chrissie to see moving lips; dressing her, on the street, at the zoo. Games helped her associate and put things together. Action pictures were cut and pasted in her “experience book.” She began to learn that lip movements go along with the sounds of voices. Then she would try to make those sounds even though she would never hear some of them.

Her unused vocal muscles had to be strengthened and controlled. She had to be taught to drink through a straw, to blow out candles, acts most children learn as they learn to talk. Blowing with feathers, paper, dandelion flowers combined the sense of touch and sight.

Auditory training was continuous. Sounds of airplanes, an ambulance or a police car were always called to her attention. Living near a hospital and fire station in New York City made loud sounds a part of everyday experience.

Years later, after their move to Georgia, Barbara detailed their long struggle as Chrissie’s first teachers in a paper she wrote for a motivation class. She is a social worker in the Lassiter and Sprayberry high schools in Cobb County.

Chrissie attended the Bank Street School, a non-traditional training school for teachers in New York from her sixth through her twelfth year when the Eckles moved to Marietta. Her mother considers the school an excellent experience. Chrissie gained confidence during those years despite the occasional cruelty of classmates, one who chided her for not learning sign language or others who just kept their distance from the girl who couldn’t hear.

By the time the family moved south in 1976, Chrissie had decided she was going to be aural and was teaching herself sign language with the help of the encyclopedia. When the Cobb County school system offered for the first time, a class in sign language the entire family enrolled, parents, Chrissie, younger sister, Mimi, 19, and brother John, 16.

“The children did much better than we did,” says Barbara Eckle. It was an opportunity, she adds, for them to meet other families who had children with hearing problems.

While Chrissie was a student at Walton High School, she entered an essay contest sponsored by the national pro-life magazine, “March For Life.” Her essay was among the winners, the only one from the South, and was printed in the magazine in 1980. Her contribution begins:

“I’m pro-life because I was one of the individuals whose parents had the legal right to have an abortion because my mother was exposed to German measles. Even though I was born profoundly deaf I’ve enjoyed life as a normal person would. Had I not been born I wouldn’t have known life or what it could offer me.”

Enjoying life has included the distinction of graduating with honors (fifth in the class) from Lassiter High School in 1983. “She couldn’t hear her name called out,” her mother says. “They worked out a sign so she would know when to come down.” At graduation she received a scholarship awarded by the Alexander Graham Bell Foundation to a profoundly deaf student completing the regular high school course.

Enjoying life has meant being accepted at the University of Georgia and Olgethorpe University and deciding on Emory after giving some thought to enrolling at the renowned college for the deaf, Galludet in Washington, D.C.

The lifetime awareness and acceptance of the fact that everything is harder for her is her guide at college. In each of her classes she tries to have notetakers who give her copies of their notes. But along with that “I try to keep up with the work before the lecture. It’s just a matter of being prepared, I just have to be extra prepared, I have to study more.”

Concentration on study doesn’t prevent her from enjoying dorm life. she lives in a specially equipped dorm and shares a large room , kitchen and bath with two other students. While she doesn’t need the special facilities for the handicapped, the kitchen gives her a chance to cook, one of the several skills of her independent lifestyle.

Chrissie, considering herself an “in-between person” knows the necessity of talking. She has found that “signs alone cut you off from speaking groups.” There are other ways that her handicap shuts her off so she constantly looks and finds strengths both from within and from exterior sources to break down the barriers.

“I try to set an example for others. People can do well if they put their minds to it,” Chrissie says of her achievements. She set an example last summer tutoring children with learning disabilities at East Side Elementary School in Marietta.

This summer she will be taking a physics class at Emory, a chance to concentrate on a more difficult subject. She must always work to get the hard courses out of the way, her mother says. Chrissie realizes this but nevertheless is planning a career in dentistry. Motivation and determination, her parents’ and her own, have brought success so far. There is nothing to suggest that this goal will be out of reach for her.