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Sue Thomas Deaf FBI Agent battles MS
wasn t sure if this would be in the right place but i went ahead and posted it in here....... if this needs to be moved to proper place then go right ahead and do that, I just got this in the e mail!
From the newsroom of the Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sunday,
November 16, 2003, .....
Deaf former FBI surveillance expert Sue Thomas battles new enemy: MS
Delma J. Francis, Star Tribune
One day when she was 18 months old, Sue Thomas was watching TV with her
three older brothers at home in Boardman, Ohio. Suddenly she got up and
began fiddling with the knobs on the TV set, trying to turn up the volume.
The volume was at peak. She just couldn't hear it.
Just like that, she had become profoundly deaf. Doctors could provide no
explanation.
Thomas, now 53, believes the cause was an early symptom of multiple
sclerosis, with which she was diagnosed two years ago. But despite a
lifetime of silence and the disease to battle, life is good.
"It just keeps getting better and better," said the woman whose unusual work
for the FBI inspired a hit TV series.
Thomas spoke Saturday at the MS ActiveSource conference at the Marriott
Airport Hotel in Bloomington.
The Pax network TV show "Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye," based on her work in FBI
surveillance, is viewed weekly by 2.5 million people in 30 countries. (And
yes, just as there is on the show, there was a golden retriever named Levi
in her life: her first hearing-ear dog.)
Several motion-picture studios came calling after her book "Silent Night"
(Tyndale House Publishers) was published in 1990. When funding for a movie
project fell through, the screenwriters who had been working on her story
shopped it to Pax-TV for an hourlong weekly series.
Learning to speak
The FBI phase of Thomas' life would never have happened if her parents had
not encouraged her to learn to speak and to read lips, she said. She used
those skills to communicate and in fact did not learn American sign language
until she was about 30.
Thomas spent more than seven years learning to speak with a therapist at the
Youngstown (Ohio) Hearing and Speech Center.
Today her voice has a pleasant cadence and timbre.
Despite her ability to speak and to read lips, Thomas had an unhappy school
life. Teased unmercifully by five bullies who made it their job "to make my
life miserable," and labeled a slow learner by teachers who didn't always
face her when speaking so she could read their lips, Thomas plodded along
making D's and F's.
But two people made a difference: a roller-skating coach and a high school
typing teacher.
Roller skating "saved my life big-time," said Thomas, who at 7 became the
youngest-ever champion freestyle roller skater in Ohio. How was that
possible when she couldn't hear the music? "The coach skated hand in hand
with me to the music over and over," she said. "It took a long time to learn
the routines, but I did it.
"I might have talked funny and I might be a dummy, but no other kid had a
trophy as big as mine, and no other kid could do the jumps I could do," she
said, smiling. "That coach gave me the self-worth I needed to hold onto."
In high school, a typing teacher noticed Thomas' typing skill. "She thought,
'Hey, no dummy can type 128 words a minute,' " Thomas said. The teacher
quizzed her about what she wanted to do after high school, and when she
answered, "Go to college," encouraged her. In 1976, Thomas graduated from
Springfield (Mass.) College with a degree in political science and
international relations.
"But no one wanted to hire me because I couldn't use the telephone," she
said. She turned to the speech center that had been such a part of her early
life.
"They felt sorry for me and hired me, even though they didn't really have a
job."
A friend of a friend of a friend got her a job classifying fingerprints with
the FBI in Washington, D.C.
The FBI years
Then came a breakthrough. The FBI thought it had the goods on some suspects
but couldn't prove it. The audio portion of a surveillance videotape had
failed, and they didn't have a clue what the suspects were saying.
Thomas did. She read their lips and "never went back to classifying
fingerprints." For the next 3 1/2 years, "I followed the bad guys around and
read their lips. They even paid me for it, and I stayed around long enough
to get a TV show out of it," she joked.
Thomas left the job to pursue graduate study at Columbia (SC)
International Bible University.
She had hated her deafness for 32 years, but with the help of her faith, she
said, she embraced it as a part of herself.
As a result of MS, Thomas has numbness on her right side, balance problems
and decreasing vision. She wonders how she'll communicate "when the lights
go out and I can no longer read lips," but she doesn't fret. "God is my
strength," she said.
Despite the onset of multiple sclerosis, "my quality of life is better than
ever," Thomas said. "Waking up in the morning, never knowing what that day
will bring [physically], has taught me amazing grace."
© Copyright 2003 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
wasn t sure if this would be in the right place but i went ahead and posted it in here....... if this needs to be moved to proper place then go right ahead and do that, I just got this in the e mail!
From the newsroom of the Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sunday,
November 16, 2003, .....
Deaf former FBI surveillance expert Sue Thomas battles new enemy: MS
Delma J. Francis, Star Tribune
One day when she was 18 months old, Sue Thomas was watching TV with her
three older brothers at home in Boardman, Ohio. Suddenly she got up and
began fiddling with the knobs on the TV set, trying to turn up the volume.
The volume was at peak. She just couldn't hear it.
Just like that, she had become profoundly deaf. Doctors could provide no
explanation.
Thomas, now 53, believes the cause was an early symptom of multiple
sclerosis, with which she was diagnosed two years ago. But despite a
lifetime of silence and the disease to battle, life is good.
"It just keeps getting better and better," said the woman whose unusual work
for the FBI inspired a hit TV series.
Thomas spoke Saturday at the MS ActiveSource conference at the Marriott
Airport Hotel in Bloomington.
The Pax network TV show "Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye," based on her work in FBI
surveillance, is viewed weekly by 2.5 million people in 30 countries. (And
yes, just as there is on the show, there was a golden retriever named Levi
in her life: her first hearing-ear dog.)
Several motion-picture studios came calling after her book "Silent Night"
(Tyndale House Publishers) was published in 1990. When funding for a movie
project fell through, the screenwriters who had been working on her story
shopped it to Pax-TV for an hourlong weekly series.
Learning to speak
The FBI phase of Thomas' life would never have happened if her parents had
not encouraged her to learn to speak and to read lips, she said. She used
those skills to communicate and in fact did not learn American sign language
until she was about 30.
Thomas spent more than seven years learning to speak with a therapist at the
Youngstown (Ohio) Hearing and Speech Center.
Today her voice has a pleasant cadence and timbre.
Despite her ability to speak and to read lips, Thomas had an unhappy school
life. Teased unmercifully by five bullies who made it their job "to make my
life miserable," and labeled a slow learner by teachers who didn't always
face her when speaking so she could read their lips, Thomas plodded along
making D's and F's.
But two people made a difference: a roller-skating coach and a high school
typing teacher.
Roller skating "saved my life big-time," said Thomas, who at 7 became the
youngest-ever champion freestyle roller skater in Ohio. How was that
possible when she couldn't hear the music? "The coach skated hand in hand
with me to the music over and over," she said. "It took a long time to learn
the routines, but I did it.
"I might have talked funny and I might be a dummy, but no other kid had a
trophy as big as mine, and no other kid could do the jumps I could do," she
said, smiling. "That coach gave me the self-worth I needed to hold onto."
In high school, a typing teacher noticed Thomas' typing skill. "She thought,
'Hey, no dummy can type 128 words a minute,' " Thomas said. The teacher
quizzed her about what she wanted to do after high school, and when she
answered, "Go to college," encouraged her. In 1976, Thomas graduated from
Springfield (Mass.) College with a degree in political science and
international relations.
"But no one wanted to hire me because I couldn't use the telephone," she
said. She turned to the speech center that had been such a part of her early
life.
"They felt sorry for me and hired me, even though they didn't really have a
job."
A friend of a friend of a friend got her a job classifying fingerprints with
the FBI in Washington, D.C.
The FBI years
Then came a breakthrough. The FBI thought it had the goods on some suspects
but couldn't prove it. The audio portion of a surveillance videotape had
failed, and they didn't have a clue what the suspects were saying.
Thomas did. She read their lips and "never went back to classifying
fingerprints." For the next 3 1/2 years, "I followed the bad guys around and
read their lips. They even paid me for it, and I stayed around long enough
to get a TV show out of it," she joked.
Thomas left the job to pursue graduate study at Columbia (SC)
International Bible University.
She had hated her deafness for 32 years, but with the help of her faith, she
said, she embraced it as a part of herself.
As a result of MS, Thomas has numbness on her right side, balance problems
and decreasing vision. She wonders how she'll communicate "when the lights
go out and I can no longer read lips," but she doesn't fret. "God is my
strength," she said.
Despite the onset of multiple sclerosis, "my quality of life is better than
ever," Thomas said. "Waking up in the morning, never knowing what that day
will bring [physically], has taught me amazing grace."
© Copyright 2003 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
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I reckon it'll probably be about 6 months to a year before Australian tv companies will air that show. *sigh*