By Leigh Ann Fink
For the Salisbury Post
My husband and I recently attended Salisbury High School’s Awards Assembly, where we watched many deserving students receive hard-earned awards. Many very proud parents were in attendance to watch their children receive these awards. When I left, I could not help but feel that there was a story out there I should tell … a story not about scholarships and certificates but about sheer determination.
This story is about my daughter, Kimber Fink, who is hearing impaired.
To understand how severe Kimber’s impairment is, you would have to know a little about hearing tests and something called the “speech banana.”
When testing hearing, different tones are tested and the results are marked on a chart called an audiogram. On that chart, all of the sounds of the alphabets are marked, plus a few blends: sh th, etc.
When you look at the marked sounds, they form what looks like a banana. Kimber cannot hear many of the sounds in this banana. She cannot hear sounds such as “ph, ch, sh, k, f, s and th.” Her hearing slopes from almost normal to profoundly deaf. She can hear lower frequency sounds but cannot hear high frequency sounds at all, such as alarms, her cell phone etc.
Kimber lost her hearing sometime early in her childhood. It could have been from the side effects of medicine given to her after she was born; it could have been the results of having the flu at age 1. No one really knows. All we do know is that she had a normal hearing test at birth and lost her hearing sometime after that.
She was fitted with hearing aids around the age of 3 and has worn them since. When Kimber was in elementary school, she wore a device called an auditory trainer. Her teacher would wear a microphone and the sound would go directly to a device that Kimber wore in a pouch and was connected to her hearing aids.
She hated that thing! It made her different! When she entered middle school, she decided she no longer wanted the auditory trainer and she relied more on lip reading. She has continued to do this in high school.
Kimber’s grandfather served as her mentor. Years before Kimber was born, he was hurt in an accident that resulted in the loss of his arm.
He taught her that “handicap” was just a word. He taught her that she would only be as handicapped as she chose to be. He taught her that there was always a way to do anything she wanted to do.
When she played “his” position, catcher, on the softball team, he told her there was no reason she couldn’t throw the ball all the way back to the pitcher; rolling or bouncing the ball was not an option. From then on, she hummed that baby back to the pitcher every time, despite being the youngest and smallest player on the team. She was only 3 years old!
I suspect that very few of Kimber’s teachers even know she is hearing impaired; and if they do, they have no idea how severe her impairment is. When any hearing professional sees her audiogram, they are amazed at how well she has done.
Her speech is different, but mainly because she refuses to slow down. When she wants to, she can talk quite plainly. She has maintained a 4.43 GPA and has taken honors and AP courses. She works a part-time job at Food Lion and played softball as a starter all four years of high school. She has participated in many mission trips and is heading to Belize this summer on her first out-of-the-country mission trip. She is the typical active teenager.
This fall, Kimber will be off to college to study medicine. She will start off in nursing and would like to eventually become a doctor in the neonatal unit of a hospital.
While many students will be worrying about how to decorate their dorm rooms or what sorority they want to join, Kimber will be trying to figure out how to take notes in college and lip read at the same time. She is already trying to figure out how to wake up for classes without having an alarm clock that scares her roommate to death.
But the important thing is, she will do it, because that is what Kimber does.
My husband and I and her sister, Kayla, are all very proud of Kimber.
She has taught us about determination. She has taught us that the word “can’t” is not an option. She has taught us that anything is possible.
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Leigh Ann Fink and her family live in Faith.