Sleepless

I should be in bed but not tired enough.. Been looking for deaf mom blogs.. So far I found one deaf mom and came across an article of hers.. I wanted to share this.. I could not explain "what its like to be deaf" any better than this deaf mom did.. This is what its like for me(the music part, conversation, lip reading parts and in some cases, people feel the need to raise their voice after discovering I'm deaf.. that's a big no-no!)..... Read on.

Welcome to my world.

I'm deaf.

Totally stone deaf without my hearing aids.

My audiogram shows that something has to be as loud as a jet plane taking off before I begin to hear the sound without my hearing aids. Thankfully, the nearest airport is a half hour away. Noise doesn't bother me once my hearing aids are out.

I was born with normal hearing and I was diagnosed with a moderate to severe hearing loss when I was seven. This explains why my speech is close to normal-- my hearing loss occurred after the acquisition of speech. I received my first hearing aid when I was nine, but I mostly got by on lip reading. Sound coming into the hearing aid wasn't clear, which meant that I couldn't use the phone and have an understandable conversation.


I grew up hard of hearing and I didn't use the hearing aid after school or during the summer. When I was nineteen, I was barefooting (waterskiing on bare feet) and I turned to cross the wake and fell sideways. For days, I figured I had water in my ears. Nothing sounded right. Everything was muffled and I couldn't hear people talking.

I had become completely deaf.

Fortunately, I transferred to Northern Illinois University that summer and I stayed on a co-ed floor with other deaf and hard of hearing students. I learned sign language and met my husband there. We got married a couple of years later and had three deaf and hard of hearing kids.

Many people have a hard time understanding what I can hear and what I can't hear. One of most frequent questions I encounter is often, "What can you hear?" Many times, I can identify environmental sounds, such as the phone ringing, a dog barking, a bird chittering, or the doorbell.

Conversation is a whole other ball game. If you go behind me and start talking, I'll hear you talking and I'll look until I find the source of the talking. I won't be able to understand a word you say until you walk in front of me and I can read your lips. I match what I see on the lips with the sounds I can hear, and then conversation is much clearer.

An audiologist tested my hearing recently and discovered that I can understand six percent of the words she repeated in my right ear, and zero percent in my left ear. This is without looking at her. The same words presented with lip reading, I scored nearly 100%. This means if you want to have a conversation with me, you'd better plop yourself front and center and facing me.

Many people often think that an easy way to remedy hearing loss is to make everything louder. When I'm introduced to someone and they note that I have a hearing loss, they will often raise the volume of their voice. A little bit is great, and it helps with lipreading. A lot more than a little bit is a hindrance. Just as your eyes GET TIRED OF READING THINGS LIKE THIS IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, the ears recoil when people raise their voice to mega-loudness. Louder isn't better for me, the sounds are still distorted.

Gotta love the ones that get closer and talk directly to my hearing aid. When I step back and explain that I lipread, they often over-exaggerate the lip movements. Picture Jim Carey, and you get the picture. Picture an extra-loud Jim Carey, and you have a deaf person's nightmare.

Here's an example that I often use to help others understand my world. A radio that isn't tuned into a station sounds staticky and distorted. Cranking up the volume just means that the mumbo-jumbo sounds louder. Turn the dial right, and you'll get a station that you can understand.

Music is another story though. Give me the lyrics and I can usually follow songs. Which means that if I played the Star Spangled Banner on the boom box, I can follow it for the most part.

Here's what the Star Spangled Banner might sound like to me if I didn't know the words:

Ah sa ca ya ee, ie a ar eri eye...

Mumbo-jumbo at its finest.

Once I memorize all the lyrics of a new song, I can follow along and enjoy the music. If I forget a line in a song, it becomes mumbo-jumbo until I get the words printed in front of me again. When I was a teenager, I had several friends who sat down and wrote out the lyrics to popular music. I was absolutely thrilled with record jackets (Hey, I was still driving a car with 8 track when I turned 16!) that had the lyrics printed on the back. The internet has been music heaven for me. I can instantly look up lyrics and follow along when a friend sends a music file.

Let's go back to lipreading for a moment. The politically correct term today is speechreading, because one doesn't focus just on the lips but takes in expression, movement, gestures and auditory information to comprehend speech. Trying to understand speech via lipreading/speechreading alone is often a hit or miss thing. One usually is filling in the blanks since it is tough to understand a hundred percent of a conversation. Research shows that only about forty percent of the sounds are visible on the lips, the rest is guesswork.

So let's have some fun. Go to the mirror and say "Island view." Looks just like "I love you," doesn't it? So if your hot new date is talking about a view he saw from Maui and you grab him and say "I love you too," you're going to step into an awkward moment...

Or you'll find out that the guy really loves you.

I do run into people who quickly say, "I'm so sorry!" when they find out that I'm deaf.

To that, I simply reply that there's no need to be sorry...

I sleep great at night.