The joke about attending cue camps is that it’s virtually cochlear implant city.

Sure, using a CI by choice is anyone’s prerogative, but still, it’s a surreal experience to attend a camp set up exclusively for the purposes of teaching professionals and parents to communicate with their deaf kids and see, as a fellow volunteer said, “97%” of the deafies (from age 0 to adulthood) walking around with wires hanging from their heads.

Obviously, we’re entering a new generation of deafdom — the atmosphere for cochlear implants has never been friendlier. Still, my eyeballs tried to jump out of their sockets a few times over the weekend while I was volunteering at Cue Camp Virginia.

Camp organizers were genius enough to provide an all-day moonbounce for the children’s groups to take turns using (adults even got their own session at the end of the weekend). Before any deaf child could enter, though, the staffperson in charge would frisk them to make sure no CIs (and the occasional hearing aid) made it onto the moonbounce.

This was such a streamlined operation that they had not only cubbyholes available for shoes, but for the CIs themselves, labeled temporarily with each camper’s name. Once each group was finished, there was a mass exodus over to the CI cubbyholes. At one point, two of the girls in my group got together to compare their processors.

“We’ve got the same thing,” exclaimed one girl.

The other girl took longer to respond, examining the processors closely. Finally she looked up and said, “No, mine’s prettier!”

Later, one of my kids wanted to take a break from his implant. He had the body-worn type, so I sympathized and let him put it in a bag to carry around. One of my other CI users saw that he didn’t have his on and asked me, “Why isn’t he wearing his cochlear implant?”

“I don’t know.”

“But why won’t he wear it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does he not like wearing it?”

“Maybe, I don’t know.”

Five minutes later:

“Why isn’t he wearing his cochlear implant yet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there something wrong with it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then why won’t he wear it?”

Sighs. “I don’t know.”

“You know, he needs to wear it. If you don’t wear it for a long time then the little hairs in your cochlea grow hard or go away and then you can’t hear anymore and you can’t ever use your cochlear implant again and that’s bad and he won’t be able to hear, so he has to wear it.”

Oh, lordy lordy. What could I say?

Come to think of it… the reaction to me as a volunteer was quite telling. The hearing kids in my group were scared to death of me. They acted as if they’d never seen a deaf person before. They refused to answer my questions or listen to me. One even ran away from me crying.

The deaf kids, however, never noticed that I was deaf. Now that I’m looking back on the experience, I wonder if it’s because I didn’t have any visible wires on me (although I did wear my hearing aid).