The Deaf One in the Corner

I’ve created a comfy corner in my Substack where there is no background noise and there are no clattering coffee makers – there’s still coffee though, goodness, imagine! Simply that in this Utopia, the frothing, whizzing, banging, whooshing coffee makers we know from 21^st century coffee shops, are on mute. The music is also off. Stay with me here people, it’s just for a few minutes now and again, and it really helps. The décor? Soft furnishings. We get to lounge around on fabric sofas with well-stuffed cushions, the carpet is plush and the walls are dressed with a bold, bright design exactly of our choosing, the simple prerequisite that it must be printed on thick wallpaper. No huge glass windows please, just enough to look through.

For here is where we’ll discuss hearing loss with the very best chance of picking up what other people are saying, with no hard surfaces for the sound to bounce off in a tinny-edged, fuzzy cloud and disappear before we can say: sorry, just one more time?

You won’t hang out with me for long before realising that I am one of the 1:6 who has hearing loss. I’m ‘profoundly deaf’ in one ear and ‘severe to profoundly deaf’ in the other. This is quite a lot of deafness and I can’t pretend I’m always swinging from the treetops in joy and gratitude for the situation. Nor can I pretend that my level of deafness doesn’t affect my quality of life on a daily basis. But I do thank my very lucky stars that I was born when I was. I am fortunate in that where the hearing aids available before I was 40 years young didn’t work, the tech since then performs miracles all day, every day. Combine this with lipreading, and I can function - and work - without embarrassing myself, ignoring and annoying people too much of the time. If you saw my audiogram, you’d be astounded too!

Elizabeth de Meuron with her ‘modern’ ear trumpet, early 1900s

In the good old 21^st century, thanks, partly, to an ageing population where hearing loss is more prevalent, there is much investment in the technical brilliance to improve hearing loss. There can always be more, of course, but as far as Nice News about hearing loss is concerned, there is lots to celebrate and to look forward to.

Nor is it all about technology and it doesn’t all cost money. There is so much that we can all do to make the world a sweeter, easier place for people with hearing loss. And you know, improved communication provides a happier environment for everybody, not only the 1 in 6, but also those who attempt to communicate with us. We’re all happier when everyone understands first time, right?

Often, it’s simply a matter of raising awareness and understanding of the mind-blowing brilliance of human hearing. It’s so much more than the those hammers and anvils we learnt about at school. You know that thing about speaking with our faces not our lips and 93% of what we communicate is through our behaviours and mannerisms? This is HUGE for people with hearing loss and we should all be exploiting this to its very full potential. Life is clearer for everyone if we look at each other when we speak.  

Here’s an anecdote that was even a surprise to me, the girl with the grommets as a child and the hearing aids as a forty year old. I was really concerned when the discussion opened on introducing mask wearing during Covid. I’m not launching into a whole other topic here, I hasten to add, only sharing my fear that when it came to communicating over the next however many months, I may as well admit defeat now, hunker down on my own and drown my sorrows in subtitled TV.

If you dropped to the bottom of a swimming pool and happened to bump into somebody desperately whispering something incredibly important to you while stuffing socks in your ears, that’s the best likeness I can give of how I hear sound without my wonderful aids. The muffling effect of a mask would undo much of the brilliant work my aids do, and to cap it all, I’d have no lipreading to do its very best work for me.

I was worried.

But the reality was different. ‘How are you hearing this?’ friends would ask.
I had no idea.

It made no sense. But then I realised that if you add eyes, enthusiastic eyebrows and cheek bones, to the rise and fall of the pitch and volume behind the mask, particularly if the context is already clear, I could make a fist of it. Then there are the hands and the way the body moves with more energy when people are enthusiastic. The head droops, the voice drops a little, when news is not good. And so it goes on. I’m not saying I enjoyed it. I’m not saying it was easy or that I could keep up for much more than a sentence or two. But if I ever needed a reminder of why being able to see someone’s face when they speak is imperative to good hearing and understanding, that was it, right there.

How about you? Do you suffer with hearing loss? Are you in denial? Perhaps you live with someone with hearing loss or spend time with a colleague or friend who doesn’t hear well. Are you researching what’s out there, coming to terms with a new normal? Perhaps you’ve always had hearing loss. You may be a member of the Deaf community, communicating through sign language – if so, what’s that like? I know very little about the Deaf community, only about living with hearing loss in a hearing one. I need educating.

I’d love to hear your stories.

Please, do share. Either here, or message, if you’d like me to tell your story or just share an anecdote. Everybody is welcome in my Hearing Friendly Corner.

That’s it for now.

But I hope you’ll come back to see the Deaf One in the Corner in future. I hope she’ll have something you’d like to hear 😊