Last spring, just as she was returning from a major knee injury that had robbed her of the 2016 soccer season, George Mason University defender Niomi Serrano faced a new issue.
When her teammates spoke to her, she wouldn’t respond.
“They thought I was being rude.”
She wasn’t being rude. She couldn’t hear them.
At first, she thought she needed to clean her ears. She didn’t think much of it until the summer, when a painful case of swimmer’s ear — a bacterial infection — made normal voices sound like whispers. The pain subsided, but the hearing in her right ear did not return and, doctors told her, never will.