Today is Chad Metcalf's 20th birthday. It is also the week Helen Keller was born. But Chad and Helen Keller have more in common than an astrological sign or birth week.

        “When I was 16,” Chad begins, “I was on the homecoming committee for St. Rita's School for the Deaf.

        “We were getting ready for the party and the lights were out. A few deaf friends came up to talk to me, but I couldn't see. Everyone else could see, could talk, but I couldn't. I went out to the lobby and it was very bright there and I could talk just fine. But the gym was so dark.”

        The event is a poignant marker of both pain and joy for him: the pain of being 16 at a party and suddenly alone; the joy in remembering that understanding was soon to follow.

        Born profoundly deaf, Chad has communicated visually all his life. We sit at the dining room table in his parents' Hamilton home. Home for the summer after his second year at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. He explains we are sitting in this room, at this table, because the light is just right for him to see my questions as they are conveyed by a sign language interpreter.

        His school principal talked to him after the homecoming committee incident, he recalls, and asked him if he might have Usher syndrome. “I'd never heard of it,” he says, “so I went on the Internet to learn about it. All of the symptoms I read about, I had them all, so I printed it out and showed it to my mom and dad.”

        Usher syndrome — a rare combination of profound deafness and retinitis pigmentosa, a leading cause of blindness — was indeed a part of Chad's DNA. His parents had actually heard the diagnosis from an ophthalmologist when Chad was 8 years old, but the timeline for the dropping of the other shoe, vision loss, is always uncertain. After the initial trauma, however, the diagnosis wasfreeing for Chad.

        The possibility of Usher syndrome had first occurred to his English teacher, Sandi Lerman, who today teaches American sign language at Lakota East High School. Before coming to St. Rita's, she had worked for Dr. Jeff Bohrman, coordinator of the Ohio Deaf-Blind Outreach Program in Columbus. Dr. Bohrman is deaf-blind himself. He, too, hasUsher syndrome, and Ms. Lerman drove Chad to Columbus to meet the man who would become a significant role model.

        The biggest hurdle in adjusting to his new identity was to learn to communicate with tactile sign. Tactile sign, Chad explains, “is ASL plus.”

        When communicating visually, ASL incorporates facial expression and body language into the message. With tactile sign, in which the hands of the speakers are always in contact, all of those additional visual nuances must be signed into the hands as well.

        “At first,” Chad says, “my deaf friends didn't want to do tactile sign. They would say, "Ooooooo, I don't want to touch you,' but they got over it.”

        When a high school counselor said to him bluntly that there is no cure for Usher syndrome, Chad realized that he had one option: to accept himself as he is, a deaf-blind person. “I'm not disabled or handicapped,” he says, “I'm just a person who is deaf-blind.”

        Retinitis pigmentosa reduces vision to a central field, or “tunnel vision,” and vision diminishes at an unpredictable rate. At this point, Chad has about 20 percent of normal sight, signing visually when the light is just right, using tactile sign when it isn't. He is still able to read his printed textbooks (making As and Bs in his college course work) and is constantly in touch with friends around the country via instant messaging on his computer and pager.

        He uses a white cane sometimes, and began studying braille last summer.

        While home for the summer, Chad is teaching in the interpreter training program at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College.

        This bright young man with a decidedly bright future responded like a butterfly to news that some might have greeted with doom.

        Later, talking with his friend and former teacher, Ms. Lerman, I hear a better analogy.

        “There was always something special about him,” she says. “But after he began accepting himself as a deaf-blind person, he just blossomed. I told him the story of the ugly duckling — a story he'd never heard before — and he has flourished in just that way, the ugly deaf duckling, the beautiful (deaf-blind) swan.”

        E-mail dkkendrick@earthlink.net. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/kendrick

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