Pleasanton Writer Reflects On Surviving Terrorist Attack, Hearing Loss

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“I was devastated at the beginning,” she said. “It started slowly, and then one night, I went to sleep, and Sunday morning, I woke up and lost 30 decibels at once. I woke up and the sounds were all skewed. I could hear people speaking, but it was like they were speaking Russian, or some foreign language I couldn’t understand. I was completely freaked out.”

In 2016, after Drattell had learned to survive, then thrive, as a deaf person, her life changed again. A few days after the terror attack in an Orlando nightclub, she and her husband were on vacation in Nice, France having dinner by the Mediterranean.

“My husband glanced toward the awning; something caught his eye,” she wrote in “Promenade des Anglais,” the longest poem in “Remember This Day.

“People were diving headfirst off the promenade onto the restaurant’s canopy. How silly, he remarked. I couldn’t tell when the band music stopped, didn’t hear the rush of the truck or the screams. I did hear popping sounds – seems they were of a frequency I could still detect – grabbed my husband’s wrist, shouted, Gunshots!”

For the next several hours, Drattell and her husband found themselves in the middle of a deadly attack, in which a terrorist drove an 19-ton cargo truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day, killing 86 people and injuring 434 others. For the next several hours, the couple witnessed the carnage firsthand and hid in a bathroom stall with dozens of others, fearing they’d be next.

“Agency’s your voucher – best simply to heed it,” said in one of her shorter poems, the ultimate goal of which is to explain how one succeeds in “setting yourself free.”

After Drattell accepted that she was losing her hearing, she threw herself into a new world. She joined a local chapter of the Association of Late-Deafened Adults, where she found a supportive community and learned valuable coping and advocacy schools. She also learned American Sign Language, and enrolled in the Deaf Studies Program at Ohlone College. She then worked as a case worker for clients who were late-deafened or hard of hearing at the Deaf Counseling, Advocacy and Referral Agency in San Leandro, and eventually became its community relations director. While she was community relations director, she also became president of ALDA, where she worked with roughly 14 different deaf organizations around the country to coordinate advocacy efforts.

She eventually set up her own organization, the Bay Epicenter of Advocacy for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, in order to consolidate local efforts. The board of BEAD was composed of the heads of several local deaf organizations. During that time, BEAD put together a position paper signed by 13 organizations that they sent to the California State Senate, to request that they cover a number of communication services in the single-payer health insurance that was then under consideration. (Currently, Medicare does not cover hearing aids, and many other vital services and accommodations are not covered by insurance or included in hospitals.)

As head of ALDA, she also brought a lawsuit against Cinemark Theatres and sent a demand letter to AMC Theatres to compel them to provide closed captioning on movies any time someone requests it. “Both Cinemark and AMC worked with us, and a company called Doremi created the closed captioning equipment that we could request when we went to a theater, and then we would have captioning for any movie that was showing. We went back to going to [Century Blackhawk Plaza Theater] and having dinner and a movie, and I said, ‘Oh my god, I’m back. And it helped a lot of other people, which is why I enjoy advocacy.”

BEAD closed during the pandemic, but Drattell continues to help her community through volunteering for the California Communications Access Foundation, which helps nonprofits receive grants.

To deal with her deafness, Drattell turned outward. To deal with the horrific trauma of Nice, she turned inward, through counseling and writing.

“I didn’t think we would survive it – I thought [the terrorists] would follow us into the bathroom,” she said. “When we got back to the States, my husband was friends with a few people who themselves had been in terror attacks in India. They told him to get help from a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder therapist. That’s the most important thing that we want everyone to know, that you should go and get the help, because even if you don’t think you need it, you do. He really helped us recognize that trauma is the second arrow that we shoot ourselves with after we hurt ourselves with the first arrow.”

Drattell countered the arrow with her pen. “Writing helps me cope,” she said. She started writing poetry as a teenager, but it never went anywhere. Years later, she started writing to cope with the stress of discrimination that resulted from her adopting two children from South America. An agent helped her publish poetry from her teenage years, and with renewed confidence, she joined the California Writers Club Tri-Valley Branch, and a poetry critique group.

She dealt with her PTSD and survivor’s guilt through a collection of poems, published in August by Finishing Line Press, called “Remember This Day.”

“The poems are about the guilt of survival, the struggle to survive, the will to survive, all of my poems encompass that,” she said. “I felt that ‘Remember This Day’ is remember what it was this particular day, when this was happening. That’s Nice, that’s a bison [being hunted by wolves], that’s a tree that’s struggling to remain upright against raging waters.”

In January, Drattell and Dorrance Publishing Company released a children’s book called “Who Wants To Be Friends With A Dragon?”, which tells the story of a dragon ostracized for his appearance who learns how to make friends. Her co-author, Eve-Marie Little, was tutoring her in Spanish, and using children’s books as a teaching tool. One day, Little told Drattell that she should write a children’s book.

“We said it would be about a dragon with a long tail and he’s green and he’s got spikes and he’s scary, and then we started saying, the dragon would have a hard time making friends because people would be scared of him, and the more we talked about this dragon who decided to self-isolate because he felt he was different and nobody could possibly want to be his friend, I said ‘Wait a minute, that dragon is me because of my hearing loss,’” she said. “And Eve my co-author said no, that dragon is me being Tex-Mex – I don’t fit in anywhere.”

Their illustrator, a Filipino immigrant named Mark Vicente studying with Little, said he felt the same way. The more they’ve shared, the more people have told them they feel like that dragon. Drattell said friends have sent her photos of their children hugging the book, and teachers have reached out to use the book in their classrooms.

Drattell is now a full-time writer hard at work. She is hoping to publish a novel about a woman ostracized in her community for being different. Finishing Line Press is also publishing a second poetry anthology of more humorous poems called “The Lighter Side of Horse Manure.”

“When you shed the frayed mask, then you’ll have succeeded in setting yourself free,” Drattell wrote in a “Remember This Day” poem called “The Who That You Are.”

“Advocating and writing both give me personal satisfaction because I’m doing what I love to do;
Click Here: cheap adidas superstarthey also give me satisfaction because my advocacy and writing touch other people,” she wrote in an email.

For more information and a full catalog of Drattell’s writing, visit lindadrattell.com.

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