Miss Deaf Alabama: Not so silent

Imagine you’re in sixth grade. You wake up early one Monday morning and begin clicking your tongue. You’re excited to be home and not in school because it’s Memorial Day, but something’s not right. You don’t hear the clicking of your tongue. You don’t hear anything. So you knock on your night stand. Still nothing.

Nicole LaMont woke up on Memorial Day, May 27, 1996, just like that - without her hearing.

“I went through phases of shock,” said LaMont, who is now awaiting admission to AUM's School of Nursing and is the reigning Miss Deaf Alabama. “Should I jump up and scream or should I go back to sleep? I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to react."

LaMont said she was unusually calm at first and ultimately decided to get out of the bed and walk to her mother’s room. She started walking, then running.

“Mommy, mommy, wake up! I can’t hear!” said LaMont. “She woke up and said, ‘Go clean your ears out.’ I told her no, I can’t hear. My mom asked me if I couldn’t hear, then how could I understand what she was saying.”

LaMont could understand because, as she later discovered, she placed off the charts at reading lips.

“It took a year and finally giving up hope, after seeing specialists in Atlanta who did all kinds of tests for meningitis, including a spinal tap, when my mom called my uncle who was a nurse anesthetist in Tennessee at the time. He arrived in Montgomery in what seemed about three hours,” said LaMont. “He talked to the doctors and I was called back to the Birmingham Children’s Hospital to do one more test, an MRI.”

LaMont said a doctor on call looked at the film and noticed something the size of a pen tip next to her ear. He then did a biopsy and found neurosarcoidosis – a scar tissue that forms on its own. The symptoms are very similar to meningitis. It affected her sight, optic, facial and hearing cranial nerves.

“There’s no cure for it,” said LaMont. “At the time, doctors didn’t know how to treat it. Normally, it affects people in their late 20s to 40s. I was 12 at the time, and there were no cases ever found in someone my age. I was the first. There were some in younger people, but they were no longer living and they had no records. They didn’t know what to do. Worldwide they had never heard of anyone my age with this disease. I became a medical guinea pig.”

LaMont said doctors came from all over the world. Medical students wanted to meet her and touch her because she had such a rare disease.

You wouldn’t know LaMont was deaf until she pulls back her hair and shows her ear piece. Her speech is better than most and she doesn’t seem to have trouble hearing.LaMont says this is due to her having her speech intact until she was 12 years old, when she lost her hearing.

Now at 25, LaMont has accomplished more than most people would have ever thought. She was crowned Miss Deaf Alabama and will compete in the national Miss Deaf America pageant in Philadelphia, PA in July 2010. As Miss Deaf Alabama, she will focus on speaking to groups and schools, encouraging deaf students across the state to go out and face the world.

“I want to give them inspiration and encourage them to put on a brave face and go out and face the world,” said LaMont.

LaMont is a graduate of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., and holds a degree in biology. She hopes to pursue a nursing career at AUM next fall, and she recently finished her Nursing School prerequisite courses at AUM. LaMont plans to use the scholarship money she won in the Miss Deaf Alabama pageant toward her Nursing School goal and what she calls her “to do” list.

“I have what I call a ‘to do’ list rather than making a list of goals, like most people do. I like to think of it as a ‘to do’ list, things I will actually complete,” said LaMont whose twin sister Monique is currently a student at AUM in the School of Nursing. “Most people who have goals never complete them.”

At the top of LaMont’s “to do” list is to bring captioning to movie theaters, particularly open captioning, where words are on the screen itself instead of using a rear window captioning.

“Going to the movies is a public event, and the majority of deaf individuals with hearing disabilities feel rejected or not part of that group,” said LaMont. “A new hot movie comes out and we have to wait for the DVD to come out so we can watch it at home. It takes away the excitement.”

LaMont’s first open captioning experience was at a theater in Washington, D.C.

“I’ll never forget I saw When a Stranger Calls in D.C., and for the first time I went with deaf friends,” said LaMont. “This was so cool. I didn’t have to go and tap my sister to find out what was going on.”

LaMont said she doesn’t want to annoy people while she’s at the movies, having to constantly tap them on the shoulder to find out what's going on. It’s just one of the many ways she is inspired to change the world.

“With the title of Miss Deaf Alabama I have more of a voice,” said LaMont. “Even the smallest thing can make a difference. The biggest thing on my ‘to do’ list, right now, is to make a difference.”

LaMont's mom, Joycelynn LaMont, Nicole LaMont, twin sister Monique LaMont and grandmother Annie Talley.

Oct. 28, 2009