Years ago, while Nicola Earl and her young daughter Sadie were waiting to be seen at the cochlear implant clinic in Christchurch, a teenage girl said something that would stay with her long after.
The girl had been on holiday and jumped into a pool with her implant on – she’d simply forgotten she was deaf.
“What I heard,” Nicola recalls, “was this is a teenager who is deaf, but has a cochlear implant, but is on holiday, swimming and just doing everything with her family like a normal teenager.
Back then, Nicola’s own children were little. She didn’t know what their teenage years would look like. Now she does. And if you asked 16-year-old Sadie Earl’s friends to describe her, ‘deaf’ wouldn’t be the first word they’d reach for.
Tammie Pittwood Photography
“I forget they’re there sometimes,” says Sadie of her bilateral cochlear implants, which she has worn since she was eight months old.
“Even my friends say, ‘oh, I kind of forgot you had them.’ They don’t really affect my day-to-day life.”
Sadie attends Inglewood High School in Taranaki – where her father Tony teaches Physical Education (PE). She is, by her own admission, not exactly a fan of sitting still.
Her favourite subject is PE (“I like not staying in class”) and outside of school she plays basketball and volleyball for the school, hits the gym and spends as much time as possible with friends. She also works at a local takeaway shop. Life, in other words, is full.
“She just loves being social,” says Nicola. “She’s sporty, she loves her friends and family – that’s who Sadie is.”
Tony says the fact Sadie and her brother Benji have cochlear implants opened up opportunities. “Being deaf hasn’t limited them in any way because they just do normal things – or extraordinary things.”
Extraordinary is a fair word for some of Sadie’s experiences and her cheeky sense of humour shines through when she talks about them. She has appeared on television twice – the first time entirely without her parents’ knowledge.
As a young child, she submitted a joke to a children’s TV show called Fanimals and it aired before anyone at home had any idea. “I didn’t even tell mum or dad about it,” she laughs. “One of mum’s friends went up to her and was like, ‘oh, I saw Sadie on TV the other day.’ Mum was like, are you sure?’”
Sadie appeared on the same show a second time, being selected for a segment involving a farm stay by confidently claiming she could act like a 10-year-old – despite being nine.
More recently, Sadie took part in a short film called Hand in Hand, made in Auckland in 2022 and based on true stories.
In the 1970s, using New Zealand Sign Language in schools was banned. The true story of two girls breaking the rules in the name of friendship sheds light on the history and realities of being deaf and was written and directed by Shelley Waddams and produced by Georgia Hoskins-Smith.
Sadie auditioned via Zoom, learned her lines and spent four full days on set. The film went on to win awards at a film festival.
During breaks, she found herself gravitating not toward the other young cast members but toward a deaf woman on set, the two of them signing back and forth between takes. “It was really fun,” she says.
Sadie currently has an agent, and while she is characteristically breezy about where acting might take her (“You’ll see me on TV next week”), she hasn’t ruled it out.
As for what comes next, Sadie is in no rush to decide but it’s likely to involve helping people or animals.
For parents Nicola and Tony, sharing their children’s stories has always been about more than their own family.
“We’re the ones with the teenagers now,” says Nicola, “and there are other families with small children and babies who are in that position where they don’t know what their child’s life might look like. I think it’s important to share their stories – to show that they’re having normal teenage experiences and lives.”
Sadie’s photos with her brother Benji and the rest of the family for the Southern Cochlear Implant Programme have appeared on billboards and buses and in newsletters – a fact she finds equal parts flattering and mortifying.
“There’s a big poster when you walk into SCIP in Wellington,” she says, “and it’s like – cringe.”
It’s reassuring that, at 16, Sadie is exactly the kind of teenager that the anonymous girl in the waiting room once promised she could be.
Sadie’s original story was published alongside her brother Benji’s in the 2019 edition of this newsletter. Both children have bilateral cochlear implants.
Read Benji’s latest story here.