Where did this vision of helping others come from?
Well, it all started when I was eight.
And my mother had remarried and had three boys, all of whom
I loved dearly.
But the first one was autistic.
And I was old enough to be the built-in babysitter,
so I spent a lot of time with him.
And he had needs and a very low tolerance level.
So either he was happy and really happy
or he was really not.
He was three years old pretty much until he died.
He died this last January in his 60s.
And I had to learn how to meet his needs without him
being able to communicate them.
They're just like a three-year-old who just throws a fit,
but they can't articulate exactly what's bothering them.
So because he really didn't speak in full sentences
until we retrained his hearing when he was in his 30s,
I read a book about what was called Hearing Equals Behavior.
And it was about the hearing problems
that autistic people have.
I realized that he could hear low frequency
sounds like motorcycles and buses and airplanes
really well, which is why when he was a baby,
he used to put his hands over his ears
when those sounds were around.
But what I didn't know is he couldn't hear high frequency
sounds at all.
And vowels are low frequency and consonants are high frequency.
So STF, those are all sounds that appear.
They're up in the buzzing frequency.
So he couldn't hear consonants.
So he couldn't speak consonants.
So we found some people who did ear retraining.
And after that, he started to hear consonants,
and he started speaking in full sentences.