(Ch. 41 & 42 of my story of my journey into Deafhood…)

In 1981, at the young age of 17, I recovered from a rare illness that took my hearing. The second month following my release from the hospital was marked by that all-powerful first trip to an audiologist to be fitted for hearing aids. This was as dreadful as it was exciting. It was a strange concept to be fitted for hearing aids at such a young age, as I had always associated hearing aids with senior citizens and being old. I had never seen anyone my age using hearing aids before. I also wasn’t fond of wearing them. I thought they were ugly and drew unwanted attention to my new disability. I was not yet comfortable in my new identity as a hearing impaired person and I didn’t want other people to see me as “broken.” I was glad that my hairstyle was long and covered my ears so my hearing aids would not be seen.

Getting hearing aids also meant having to accept that my hearing loss was probably permanent, which I still didn’t want to believe. Yet, I eagerly went through with the procedure only because, like many people who finally get fitted for hearing aids, I naively believed they would restore my hearing.

Sadly, this was not the case. While my hearing aids did help increase volume at times, they did not help with speech distortion. For me, using hearing aids was like listening to people talk through tin cans under water. Words were mostly fuzzy, unintelligible, or horribly garbled. Ironically, while most sounds were too soft to hear, sometimes they were too loud to stand!

This fuzzy and unusually loud hearing was a result of a condition called “recruitment,” which accompanied my bilateral sensori-neural hearing loss.

With my new “ear horns,” as my step-dad used to call them, I could hear forks scraping loudly across porcelain plates, the clip-clop of shoes pounding the ground, and the wind whipping my hair across my hearing aids (which sounded as if I were standing near a loud vacuum cleaner!). With all these abnormally loud environmental sounds, I could not hear conversation clearly. In fact, my hearing aids only served to hinder my ability to make any sense out of speech. This could be one reason why some people refuse to wear their hearing aids after being fitted for them. Silence can be golden and a lot less stressful.

During my word discrimination tests with the audiologist, with or without additional volume, I was not able to distinguish similar sounding words. They all sounded about the same to me. Was it “done,” or “dumb,” or “thumb,” or “fun”? Words were either monosyllabic grunts or just a bunch of loud, unintelligible, meaningless noise. Unless I was able to see a person’s mouth when they spoke, I could not make sense of what I was hearing.

About a month after I got my new hearing aids, I was sent to a lipreading class at the local university. A preppy female college student who was majoring in speech pathology worked with me. I remember her well. Her smile was big and bright, but more importantly, her teeth were straight and clean, which I was secretly thankful for, since I would be watching her talk.

I had become more aware of people’s teeth now that I had to rely on lip-reading. I found myself suddenly disturbed when I had to focus on a mouth with yellowed or horribly shaped teeth.

It was worse when I had to watch people talk with their mouths full, or those who spit when they spoke. I was disgusted by how many people have thin strings of saliva in the front or back of their mouths when they speak that never seem to disappear. Yuck!

Fortunately, lip-reading this young woman wasn’t a repulsive experience. To her surprise, I got almost all of the words in all of the sentences correct. While I was pleased, I was not so surprised. My eyes had naturally been trained to focus on mouths, since I had been in choir for many years while in school. I had learned to keenly watch mouths full of song for correct diction and enunciation during my many choral rehearsals and competitions. My choir directors had worked endlessly to teach us how the shape of our mouths could produce different tonal qualities. I learned to read lips even when people weren’t singing, almost unaware that I was doing so. It had become an ingrained habit.

After my second appointment, my lip-reading instructor told me I didn’t need these classes and sent me home. I felt rather good knowing that my lip-reading skills were rated so highly, but in spite of my great scores with this teacher, I discovered that there were many challenges that prevented successful lip-reading of others.

For example, not everyone spoke as clearly or slowly as my lip-reading instructor did. I had a really hard time lip-reading people who had a mustache or beard. I really struggled if the speaker had an accent, lisp, or an overbite; and some people threw me for a loop if they talked through clenched teeth like former President Jimmy Carter.

Now that body art is an “in” thing, lip and tongue rings are the newest challenge for a lip-reader like me.

There were people who talked while munching food, chewing gum, biting on pencils, or sucking on cigarettes, making it impossible to understand what they were saying.

A number of people leaned on their elbows and put their hands on their chins or in front of their mouths while they talked, which completely blocked my ability to read their lips.

I was also extremely challenged in group situations when people would begin talking before I could see them, or turn away in mid-sentence and continue talking while I could no longer see their mouths. While in groups, many people talk at the same time.

Having the ability to “over-hear” the conversations of others, they can actually keep up with the changes in subject and jump into another person’s conversation. I remember this. I wish I had eyes on the sides of my head. It is nearly impossible for me to lip-read or follow conversation in groups.

This has been a difficult adjustment for me since, I am by nature, a social person and historically very comfortable in groups. I even preferred group gatherings. But now, I prefer one on one conversations or participating in structured group settings where the speakers have to raise their hand to take their turn.

Sometimes, I wish I could give everyone a talking stick to pass around to the person who is speaking so I can follow. I hear it works well for family meetings!

Even when I do manage a clear view of the speaker’s mouth, I can not always read lips because so many sounds are made in the back of the throat or behind the teeth. However, I have managed by learning to keep a good sense of humor and occasionally poking fun at what I think people were saying. It is a coping skill, a sort of comic relief that has prevented me from spiraling into depression.

(Footnote: You have been reading the chapters in my summer storyblog entitled: My Journey Into Deafhood, which tells of the first recognition of my deafness and waking up to a world of silence. It also tells of how I grieved, coped, adapted and then thrived as I learned to embrace my Deaf self. Thank you for reading! The final installment will show on August 8th, 2007. More coming soon…)

Posted by LaRonda on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 4:45 am.