hearing child hi there whats meaning of "hearing child" and gist of this sentence" In this way, there can be no condescension or looking at a distance" SACKS: I think one needs to have some sort of inner vision as well. When I was thinking and writing about people who are deaf, and born deaf, I had a friend—actually a hearing child of deaf parents, extremely fluent in both sign language and speech—who would often come along with me. When I went to the island of the colorblind, which I wrote about in another book, one of my fellow travelers was a physiologist who himself was born totally colorblind. In this way, there can be no condescension or looking at a distance. But now my own cancer is a sort of mediator. Some of my patients at least know that I too am a patient. Although in some sense, we’re all patients.