## The Deafness
In 1976, a course of antibiotic treatment administered through the Veterans Administration left Desmond Doss completely deaf. He believed the overdose of antibiotics was responsible, though the precise medical causation is not straightforwardly documented in the public record.
He lived without hearing from 1976 until 1988, when he received a cochlear implant that restored his ability to hear. That is approximately twelve and a half years of silence — years in which he could not hear his wife’s voice, his son’s voice, music, or the sounds of the Rising Fawn farm he had built.
His disability rating, which had been 90% after the tuberculosis treatment, rose to 100% after the deafness. He was, by the VA’s accounting, completely disabled.
He did not, by any account, regard this as the end of his life in any meaningful sense. He continued to farm, continued to build things with his hands to the extent his arm permitted, and continued to receive occasional visitors who wanted to hear about the war from someone who had been there.
## Dorothy
Dorothy Pauline Schutte Doss had been with Desmond since 1942. She had waited through his Pacific deployments, worked through his years of tuberculosis treatment, raised their son, and been the family’s primary financial support through most of the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1982, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. For nine years, she received treatment while Doss cared for her. On November 17, 1991, he was driving her to a medical appointment when his car went over an embankment. Dorothy died from the injuries sustained in the accident. She was seventy-one years old.