Hearing loss doesn't stop FMU grad

FLORENCE - Jonathan Smith is like any early-20s college graduate.

He's looking for a job.

Smith graduated from Francis Marion University in December with a degree in Management Information Systems.  But his path to the diploma nearly stopped before it could begin in the summer before his freshman year.

"I noticed my hearing dropped in my left ear," said Smith. His mother recommended they see a specialist, and an MRI revealed he had neurofibromatosis type II, or brain tumors on his auditory nerve and pressing against his brain stem. Two of them. Smith said the disease causes tumors to form on any nerve in the body.

"I had to have one removed, so I had to drop out of my first semester of college before I started in order to have that surgery," said Smith. "That left me completely deaf in my left ear."

Another surgery forced him to miss more school time, and now Smith has an implanted hearing aid on his right side.

"My doctor told me it gets better the longer you wear it," he said. "Right now, it makes my lip-reading about 20 percent better."

But lip-reading won't help in college classrooms.

"College teachers don't tend to write stuff on the board a lot," said Smith. So he worked with staff at the campus counseling center to team up with graduate assistants for help with note-taking.

A couple of assistants, including Karen Copeland, worked with Smith during his time on campus.

"It was just kind of part of the job to begin with," said Copeland, now a therapist on staff at the Pee Dee Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Assault and the Elizabeth Pettigrew Durant Children's Center.

"Sometimes it can be frustrating when we can't communicate," she said. "It definitely helped build patience."

Copeland and the assistants would type out what professors said in lectures, and Smith could use that to supplement the textbooks. The combination helped him earn mostly A's and B's throughout his career at F.M.U.

"The graduate assistants helping me is probably the reason I graduated somehow," said Smith.

But he also credits F.M.U.'s small class sizes and tightly-knit academic departments for allowing him to be comfortable enough to approach professors and ask for additonal assistance and if he needed to do more to keep up with the classes.

"I had one professor that even told me he would shave his beard off it if would help me read his lips better," said Smith. "That was a big deal for me."

Now, Smith looks for a job in a world that often is too busy to stop and repeat or stop to explain, and he struggles with that sometimes, but he always looks for ways to help.

"I know that, in order to be successful, I'm going to need a little help from other people," he said. "I pretty much think every day about how I can make it easier for other people to communicate with me."