For me listening is very tiring. It involves a constant game of fill in the blanks to comprehend what people are saying. Because this is all internal, people who are not hard of hearing or deaf themselves have no idea how hard it all is. For me it's a point of pride to handle it without making my problem become yours. Occasionally I do share the crazy stuff I think someone has said before I figure it out what they really said, but that is usually only with my nearest and dearest or with someone who really doesn't seem to get that I have a hearing loss.
The best illustration that I've found so far of what hearing loss is like is this video clip featuring the Flintstones. The audio has been altered to reflect different levels of hearing loss. To me the world has been a quiet place for a long time. I don't remember ever hearing at the normal level portrayed in the video but perhaps I did as a child. I think for much of my adult life I experienced mild hearing loss and that it was only once I crossed over into moderate loss that it became problematic for me. If you watch this video, you'll understand better how this could be possible.
A Comparison of How You Hear to How I Hear
Audiograms
Another way to explain my hearing loss is to look at my audiogram, the chart the audiologist produces based on my hearing tests.
5 comments:
Hearing didn't get hard for me for some time, but looking back I can see that there were warning signs.
One of the signs was when I began to notice during "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that the music on the soundtrack was overwhelming the dialogue. My response was to think: "Is there something wrong with the soundtrack?" It was only later that I was aware that a soundtrack isn't monochromatic, if you will. Pitch wanders all over the place based on the gender of the speaker and other factors. But I didn't connect it to hearing loss, until about the turn of the century.
I hate to admit it but I tried calling into "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" in the show's infancy to answer a short battery of qualifying questions. Because I needed to answer on the touch-tone keypad, I kept the phone to my left ear to free up my right hand. I was shocked when I couldn't understand a word; it was all aural mud.
I also noticed that my ears were "playing tricks on me." I'd be listening to a piece of music and when it reached a certain point it went horribly sharp or flat. Nobody else seemed to notice, though. It even happened when I was listening to music I knew by heart. The whistling bridge from Paul Simon's "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard" was especially painful.
That got me started in learning about my hearing loss. The biggest question was "Why?" There was no history of deafness in my family. My doctor's best guess is that it was caused by Type II Diabetes. Sure, the major damage everybody associates with it happens in the eyes (retinopathy) or the feet (neuropathy), and thank you God I have been spared those conditions. But we have nerves all over, and the ones in my ears seem to have been the ones affected. When I talked about this with my physician I quoted the line from Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" about how fighter pilots avoid seeing doctors themselves: "It could blow at any seam." He appreciated that.
I wear hearing aids which help a lot; if I didn't, I'd be deaf for all practical purposes. So I'm learning ASL ; slowly, but I'm learning it. It's a good day when I only miss half of what other people say; I've learned to speech read to a small degree and to ask for eye contact.
I hope I'm not rambling, but that's been my situation to date. Thankfully it hasn't had much of an effect on me professionally; as an indexer, I don't have to interact with people to any great degree.
Thanks for sharing your story, Daniel. I can certainly relate to music sounding wrong and missing speech. This is the first time I have heard of diabetes being associated with hearing loss. I will have to look into that more.
Thanks again for writing,
Sarah
I have had hearing problems on and off all my life, but now at 57 I am well aware that it's not the phone's fault that I don't understand most people. I'm doing online education, and I have to use the closed captions in the school videos. Suddenly after a lifetime of knowing sign language and having empathy with the deaf and hard of hearing community, I have become aware that I am one of you! My graduate study work is in online education, and I am seriously considering making a specialty of online education for people who cannot HEAR what is being said in videos and interactive learning events. I do sign but I know very few deaf people so I'm out of practice. Hearing aids will be the next step, I imagine. In the meantime I turn everything up and let people know they are better off emailing me than expecting me to hear the phone! I am in that same "muddy" listening mode -- I can hear the sounds, but frequently have no idea what is being said unless I specifically ask someone to slow down and look right at me. Thanks for not telling us to shhh!
Hi Lynn,
You may be interested in a series of posts I wrote on the topic of accessible online education.
Thanks for sharing your story,
Sarah
Thanks for the little video. I have emailed it to half of my address list, so that people can understand what I hear - very close to the 'moderate' loss. In good conditions, my hearing aids make it like mild loss, but very often they don't. The most common reply has been "I didn't realise". I work a lot with deaf people, and they are having fun with it too!
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