"I felt as though heaven and earth just collapsed on each other," Giron said.
She turned for help to a doctor at California Hospital Medical Center, where Jose was born. She can't remember the doctor's name, but said she'll always remember his kindness.
"Don't worry," she remembered him saying. "You're going to be in good hands."
The hospital referred Jose to the House Ear Institute, a nonprofit research and treatment center, for more tests. He was fitted with hearing aids at 6 months and referred to the John Tracy Clinic, a nonprofit education center for parents of children with hearing loss.
For about 95% of such children, there is no family history of deafness, said Barbara Hecht, president of the clinic. And there often is no explanation. It comes, she said, "out of the blue."
Like most parents on first arrival, Giron and Franco were still in shock.
"There's tremendous grieving going on," Hecht said. "It's almost like a death in the family, of the dreams you had for your child. Our job is to put the pieces of the dream back together."
Franco, who met Giron after emigrating from Guatemala in 2003, took months to accept that his first child could not hear.
"I thought it was a big mistake, a misdiagnosis," he said through a translator. "Probably we men react differently than mothers do. Even after the exams confirmed it, I had this inner voice telling me he was going to hear, to talk."
In ways Jose's parents never imagined, he has.
The clinic, in a leafy enclave near USC, is named after the deaf son of its founder, Louise Tracy, and her husband, actor Spencer Tracy. (John Tracy died last year at age 82.)
Bucking the conventions of the day, Louise Tracy taught John from infancy to interact with the world. The clinic she founded in 1942 began as a support group for mothers who did not want to send their deaf children to state boarding schools.
At her insistence, the clinic does not charge families for its services. Instead, it requires at least one parent to commit to a regimen of individual counseling, family support groups and preschool classes until the child is 6 and ready to enter regular kindergarten.
As much as her family needed the income, Giron gave up a job she loved at a bakery to go to school with Jose.
"Typically, kids pick up a language incidentally," she said. "With a deaf child, you have to talk with him over and over. He does hear it. His brain is learning how to memorize it."
