On the campus of Western New England University, students come from a range of different backgrounds. Some students come from California, Saudi Arabia, or New York. Many students are bilingual, and quite a few students are fluent in sign language. A handful students are colorblind, and some have learning disabilities. All of these characteristics are what make our student body so unique.
One individual, sophomore Pharmaceutical Business major and athlete Matthew Ottochain, has a quality that differs from the majority of other students: he has a severe hearing disability.
For the first three years of his life, Ottochian was unable to hear anything: unable to recognize the sound of his mother’s voice, unable to enjoy a book being read to him, unable to listen to the sounds of people singing to him on his birthday. He was born with binaural profound sensorineural hearing loss, a disability in which results in perpetual deafness in both ears.
It wasn’t until seven months into his life that his hearing disability was discovered. When attending a party, the chatter and banter of guests and popping of balloons didn’t seem to phase the young infant. “I just sat there not knowing what was going on,” Ottochian recalls from stories he’d heard from his family.
After being examined for hearing loss, his parents were given news that they were not expecting: he passed the test. The doctors did not think there was anything wrong with his hearing. Unsatisfied with the test results, Matt’s mom pushed for more. “Sure enough,” Ottochian states, “they had discovered I had a hearing loss.”
Therefore, it wasn’t that he didn’t know what was going on at the party; he was born with specific nerve damage to either the cochlea, which is a part of the inner ear that translates sound into nerve vibrations, or the auditory nerve, which brings these vibrations to the brain. It is possible, too, that both parts of the ear can have damage, but the logistics of that are unknown. In simpler terms, he was unable to produce the necessary vibrations in order for his brain to detect and understand sound.
For the next two and a half years of his life, Ottochian matured into a toddler still being unable to hear. At age three, he underwent a surgery in order to battle his deafness, and that was when he received a cochlear implant. When asked the time-frame that he could have received the surgery, Ottochian’s mother stated: “[He] could have been implanted a little earlier, but I had concerns and it took awhile for me to submit [him] to that. The surgery was six hours long and they drilled a hole in [his] skull.” For a young child, this was a severe, grueling procedure for both Ottochian and his family.
It wasn’t until one month after the surgery that Ottochian could put his new hearing device to the test. It paid off, however, and when the healing process was complete, he was able to hear out of his right ear when wearing the device on the side of his head.
After his surgery, Ottochian was able to advance in schooling progressively. He attended two years of preschool at Southbridge School in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and here, his focus was directed toward learning to hear, speak, and comprehend words in order to be able to communicate efficiently. He also attended speech therapy for the majority of his years in school before coming to Western New England University.
In addition to his cochlear implant, Ottochian had a piece of technology called a FM system that he used in order to be able to hear better in the classroom. “It was a microphone that would link to my implant so I could hear what the teacher was saying better,” he describes. However, he stopped using this device in middle school because he wanted to be able to socialize and interact with other students, not just be focused on the teacher the entire time.
Ottochian faced other adversities growing up that others may not have experienced, including being bullied in middle school. “…Kids then thought it was funny to just pick on kids with something they can’t help themselves with,” he says.
Despite his hearing disability, Ottochian led an ordinary childhood. He began to play flag football and baseball in first grade, and in third grade, he was introduced to basketball. “I was a player determined to get better and win at everything while having fun,” he recalls. In his freshman year of high school, Ottochian began playing tennis, which is the sport he now plays as a student-athlete at Western New England University.
There are a few things that Ottochian must go through every day that make him different than the traditional student on campus, and some of these things are daily endeavors that people may not even think about. For example, when Ottochian is sleeping, he doesn’t wear his cochlear implant; therefore, if he were to have an alarm clock go off in the morning to wake him up, he would not be able to hear it. Instead, he has a vibrating alarm clock. When it reaches the time to wake up, the alarm clock vibrates the bed instead of setting off a noise. This lets him know it’s time to get up without having to hear anything.
Ottochian’s story of battling a dramatic life-altering disability is something that can be admired by students and faculty alike. Despite all of the hardships that he faced growing up, Ottochian is a smart, successful adult who works hard everyday to battle the obstacles that life throws at him. Western New England University has the opportunity to grow and prosper in the light of all students that bring unique qualities onto campus, and Ottochian is no exception to that statement.
