Deaf for a Day

You know those moments in life where you have a chance exchange with someone which is not particularly remarkable in isolation, but nonetheless makes you smile and brightens your day? I have a lot of these when I manage to walk away from my pc and jump back into the real world.

However, this telephone exchange with a booking agent the other day was not one of those moments. No, this one left a mark in my brain for all the wrong reasons. And had it not given me an idea of how to change the world – hey, reach for the stars and you might land on the moon - it would be unremarkable; something that happens all too frequently I’m afraid, and requires nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders and a brisk brush off so that it doesn’t lend a dark shadow to the day.   

I *may* have mentioned previously that I am the one in six in this country who struggles with poor hearing. I’ve written about it specifically here and here. Sometimes my mishears are amusing and sometimes they pass with nobody, least of all me, registering. I am fortunate to be surrounded by sensitive friends and family who do their best to make things easier for me and I am also incredibly lucky to be the owner of the very latest in hearing aid technology which is the difference between me working and, to be frank, leaving the house or not. But I would be lying if I said that hearing loss is easy, disingenuous if I pretended it didn’t pervade all aspects of spoken communication with the outside world. 

When people aren’t impatient with my ‘pardons?’ and when they don’t jump from a gentle comment to a megaphone shout which I can hear, boy can I hear, but still can’t make sense of the sounds (because a shout, I’ve learnt, distorts the sound even more) that makes me very happy.

In this phone call the person on the other end of the line broke all the rules of communication with the one in six who is hard of hearing. She was irritated. I may not be able to hear every word but even without the eye rolling and screwed up face, I can hear irritation. She had no time in her busy day to repeat everything three times. Couldn’t I just concentrate a little harder because then I’d be able to hear, surely? Simple.

If only.

I do try to be a grown-up about this. I realise I should go-out-and-get-myself-a-real-problem if I’m going to allow a phone call with a stranger to ruin my day. I try to pull up my big girl pants and sweat the big stuff instead, but when this kind of exchange happens once too often, in a moment when you’re struggling to remain upbeat about the weight you carry when you struggle to hear and thus communicate, sometimes those big girl pants feel very heavy indeed.

I ranted to my friends. That helped. Then I had an idea and it won’t leave me alone. I’d like to share it with you. And maybe you’re a teacher or a parent, you work in education or are simply interested in making people’s days a little brighter, and might join me in pushing this idea as far as I can.

I have some sympathy for people who don’t know how to sensitively communicate with people who can’t hear. Some sympathy. There is a part of me which thinks that if people have respect for others, and are happy to hop into their shoes when necessary, they would endeavour to hide their irritation for this disability. That seems the human thing to do. Indeed, I remember a relative constantly shouting at my terrifically sweet grandma who had developed age-related hearing loss and I ached for her.  Even as a child I understood that it wasn’t her fault and, particularly as a child, I could imagine how unpleasant it was to be shouted at, so I don’t think the concept is a particularly tricky one.

However, the nuances of improved communication with the hard of hearing do tend to come as a result of experience. My family know not to attempt to communicate with me from another room. They don’t cover their mouths with their hands as they speak. They try to rephrase a sentence rather than repeat it verbatim because they’ve learnt that a different word may be easier to hear, and they discretely help me when they can ‘just tell’ that I’ve lost the thread of a big conversation. They have learnt this from experience.

I know to speak more slowly as opposed to loudly to give people that split second longer to match the lip shapes to the sound they’ve heard. And I know that there are homophene groups, (sounds which do not sound the same but look the same on the lips) and so signing the first letter of the troublesome word might help a lipreader make sense of it. I know that context is everything so if somebody really isn’t managing the conversation, it’s probably best to stop, explain the context and start again. Life and attendance at lipreading classes has taught me this, so it isn’t fair to expect people with normal hearing who aren’t in regular contact with those with hearing loss, to know this.

But they could.

Were you lucky enough to attend one of those primary schools where pupils spent the day blindfolded to experience a quick snapshot of life for people who can’t see well? People talk about the experience way beyond their school days, referring to how effective it was in raising awareness of disability at a wonderfully impressionable age. I don’t know if this is still practised, but I do hope it is. It’s true isn’t it that some of our most vivid memories, our deepest beliefs and ethics come from innovative teaching, fun activities and unusual initiatives experienced when we were under ten years of age.

So, how about a ‘Deaf for a Day’ initiative in schools? No expensive technology would be necessary, I’m sure simple headphones could be used to block out or distort sound for a few hours. If we wanted to make it truly authentic, we could even pipe some tinnitus sounds, screeches and whooshes into ears at random moments, just to upset the train of thought, right when the pupils thought they were managing pretty well using mannerisms and context to stay in the moment. Cruel, I know 😜.

It could be fun! It is staggering how much we can pick up from the unconscious clues people give off when they speak: the music and the dance, the ‘unsaid’ and I think that alone could be informative and entertaining. Like broken feet (and knees, and a smashed up forearm) and losing our voice however, I’m sure the novelty would quickly wear off. I’d give it, oh, thirty minutes of not knowing what everyone else was laughing at, not knowing what page the teacher was talking about, not understanding the next instruction so having to watch to see what somebody else did first and hope they were doing it right before attempting to copy.

And who’s to say that this discomfort, this frustration, this feeling of melancholy about a world that was going on without us, wouldn’t stay with these children into adulthood? So when the pupil became the assistant behind the counter, the waiter taking the order, the chair of a meeting, they would instinctively keep their hands away from their mouth and look their customer or colleague straight in the eye. With this experience in their formative years, they would hopefully refrain from grimacing, answering in clipped (unintelligible) tones, or talking to you as if English wasn’t your first language and boy, were you struggling to learn. On the end of the phone they might rephrase if the conversation was clearly not going well and spell difficult words using the phonetic alphabet. But most of all, most importantly of all, they would sympathise and do everything in their power to help you communicate, to avoid making you feel stupid and that you were an irritant, in fact, they’d treat you with the same respect they’d treat any other person whose faculties were all intact.

What do you think? Can we make it happen? Shall we try?

I’d like to add that there are many people who instinctively carry out my communication wish list already. To those, I say thank you, this is such a big deal to those of us with hearing loss. Please help me spread the word that people who can’t hear have feelings too. In fact, we rather rely on them.      

A Deaf Character

A man 'in his prime', as my mum would say, a retired, silver-haired lecturer, is not peering down the top of a woman two generations his junior for reasons of impropriety. This gentleman has a hearing problem. His head is bent in order to fix his ear as close to his interlocutor's mouth as is acceptable in public, to give him the best chance of working out what on earth she is saying. Such is the first scene in the amusing novel, Deaf Sentence by David Lodge which had me chortling, sighing and laughing out loud all the way through.

I'm somewhat surprised I enjoyed it so much because, try as I might, I'm afraid there is very little about hearing loss that I find amusing. It can be peaceful. I do appreciate taking out my hearing aids in a crowded coffee shop for a spot of indulgent, uninterrupted writing. And it's with great pride that I admit I'm the Miss Marple in our house who tends to work out complicated plots and this surely comes from having to focus so completely on the subtitles of the film in question. I do also feel lucky to live in a world where there is so much technology to help us. Without my incredibly techie hearing aids, I would barely be able to function in hearing society and certainly wouldn't be able to do the work I do. 

But generally, I find my ever worsening hearing increasingly sad and isolating and I can't pretend I laugh about the situation very often.

Witty people, for example. I love funny people. I love comedy clubs, stand-up, romcoms, even my father-in-law's ever rolling conveyor belt of punditry. But these days, I can't always tell that funny people are being funny and that's a shame because I think laughter makes the world brighter. It's just not the same when your brother-in-law, second only in volume of wit to said father-in-law, with a Dad Joke thrown in, oh, every two sentences, says: Ahh! Surely your appointment's not at the hairdresser at two thirty but at the dentist? - and as the rest of his audience either groans or rolls around like little Smash men, you're still wrestling with the potential humour in your appointment not being at the bear presser but at the atheist's.

Lodge's main character, Desmond, talks humorously about the blind/ deaf comparison and it resonated with me so loudly (hah! Chance would be a fine thing). It's the truism of counting our blessings that our disability is deafness as opposed to blindness which, surely, has to be more difficult to handle, but recognising that blindness invokes pity, awe and wonder, whereas deafness arouses only an array of reactions along the continuum between mild irritation and full-on screwed up, pained face disdain. It's true, I've never known anybody grab the chin of someone who's blind and say, Just look for goodness sake! Whereas the look of anguish and the shouted irritation in the converser's raised tones – even though we understand the frustration, believe me, we do – sounds like all the world as though you're doing it on purpose. Trust me, nobody would choose not to be able to keep up with the conversation, give the impression of being stupid, not be able to join in because they can't hear the instructions, not be able to get the joke quickly enough, wear themselves out with the sheer energy it takes to focus on every single sound that does make it through their 'cloth ears' to their dulled brain as it tries to piece them together all in a rush, for fun. There is very little fun in social interaction when you can't hear and to be honest, there is very little more depressing than to be shouted at when you can't catch what someone else is saying. It makes me just want to slink away, hide and then slip away home.

But it's good to remember that I'm surrounded by very patient people and that any situation can be amusing if you look for the funny side. Lodge's book reminded me of that and although I'm a little late to the party (it was first published in 2008) I thoroughly recommend it to readers both with, and without, five fully functioning senses.

The novel also plunged me back into the ENT consultant's chair where I'd been referred as an attempt to get to the bottom of my excruciating ear pain which had gone on for months – three months, to be precise, not that I was counting. I've written about that in The Enormous Hearing Aid Dome.

By the way, I was recommended Deaf Sentence by an unassuming, fiercely intelligent, older-than-my-father-and-totally-on-the-ball retired judge and fellow student in my weekly lipreading class. He also told me that the great thing about being deaf is that we will never get Alzheimer's, because our brains are in a continuous state of brain gym, hoola-hooping their way through the jumble of words we have to piece together all day, every day.

There are silver linings in everything, you just have to know where to look 😊

The Bottom of the Swimming Pool

I had a letter in the post today from Louise Goldsmith, a 21 year old who spoke so eloquently and soulfully it pulled at my heart. I don't know Louise but I can relate to her story. She has had severe hearing loss since she was seven years old and the letter is a candid account of this 'hidden disability' as she calls it, how she'd like to say her lack of hearing hasn’t adversely affected her life in any way, but, sadly, she isn't able to do this.

It's an insight into a world I know.

I'm not sure my hearing loss is as profound as Louise's – yet – and it certainly wasn't as bad when I was in my twenties, but it is a constant stress. I'm helped by amazing technology, not least my discrete Bluetooth hearing aids (I wrote about their maiden outing, here), the crystal clear headphones for the TV and the addition of subtitles. And I thank my lucky stars that I live in an age when I can carry out my entire communication through messaging of various sorts without ever having to put any of us through the ordeal of having to speak on the phone. Cochlear implants and Bone Anchored Hearing Aids are a possibility for the future and thus I live in hope that I won't become the little old lady in the corner whom everyone ignores, because it's easier.

Nonetheless, it's isolating not being able to hear and it affects every part of life – work and play. It's exhausting when every conversation is a missing word quiz and depressing when people think you are stupid and that you don't get the joke you didn't hear.

But it isn't all bad.

I have particularly noticed recently, probably because my hearing has plummeted lately, that my family have strategies to help me join in and that these have become automatic. It means that in my home, as long as I have my hearing aids, I don't have too much difficulty communicating. Reading Louise's flier, I thought it might be useful to share some of these tips before the typical large group, multi-generational, terrifyingly full of background noise festive party season is fully upon us. I hope it might be helpful to those who hear well and those who don't.

Here goes!

Please don't SHOUT! I totally understand how frustrating it is to be with someone whose every second sentence is, 'Sorry, I missed that,' and I understand the instinct to raise our voice. However, for many of us, it isn't that a voice is quiet so much as the speech is muffled.

To try to give a picture of what it's like, imagine yourself tucking into your Christmas dinner whilst attempting to converse with your neighbour, all at the bottom of a swimming pool. New Year's Eve party? Add the Clangers to the bottom of the pool, dispersed around you, all talking loudly in sounds you can't understand but conspiring to drown out your neighbour nonetheless. If the person with whom you were trying to communicate simply shouted, it wouldn't make any difference to your comprehension. If however, they turned to face you and really enunciated their words, using more pronounced facial gestures, then you'd have a chance of understanding.

The trouble with shouting, apart from the fact it often doesn't help, is that it's really not very nice to be shouted at - particularly when everyone else is speaking at normal pitch. Because with the shout comes the facial expression: the screwed up, pained face. I know the intention is not to make the interlocutor feel awful but it makes me want to crawl away. After all, the conversationalist is clearly intensely annoyed (people only shout when they're cross, don't they?) and you are responsible for ruining their day, you and your sub-standard hearing - so why would you choose to hang around? If somebody shouts, I bluff that I've heard and feign a sudden need for the Ladies. 

Alter rather than Repeat: Often, people who struggle with their hearing miss the first word, or a particular word, and can't get the gist of the sentence because of that. Sometimes, the conversation can be saved simply through repeating it directly to the person in question but if this doesn't work, paraphrasing might be all that's needed to get around the troublesome word.

Face your Partner: For all of us, not just the hard of hearing, understanding speech is about so much more than the actual words spoken. We glean the sense of it through context and the 'music and the dance'. I remember a first hearing consultant saying to me shortly before I wore hearing aids that when he looked at my audiogram - a graph which represents the picture of an individual's ability to hear different sounds - he couldn't understand how I could possibly function but, he was quick to add, he saw this all the time. He said that it was a reminder to us that communication is about much more than words. In fact, it's oft quoted that 93% of what we hear is communicated through everything but the words. According to a certain Professor Mehrabian in 1971, 55% of communication is in the body language, 38% is in the tone of voice with only 7% being the words spoken.  

Now, the exact figures have since been rebuked but I think there is truth in the message. Certainly, that first consultant was convinced that was how people with hearing loss could manage surprisingly well. I would also suggest that people who are hard of hearing whilst perhaps not so good at hearing changes in tone of voice, might be even better at reading body language than this stat states.

And living proof of this is that I understand so much better if I face the person with whom I'm speaking. I don't officially lip read (although I'm about to learn and am ridiculously excited about the potential for my new skill) but matching the lips to the muffled sounds is often all I need.

Don't Walk Away! For the same reason, I wouldn’t even attempt to have any meaningful conversation with your back to whom you're speaking as you walk away.

Come and Ask! Likewise, my family have largely learnt that there is little point shouting from another room when they've been doing 'boys-or-teen-looking', in the hope I'll come scurrying to find said not-really-lost item. Even if I can hear the call, I won't know who or where it's coming from nor what it's about. If I'm really needed, my family have to come to me.

Well, we have to have some perks, don’t we…?

It does matter: And finally, and oh so importantly, please, please don't say, It Doesn't Matter. Because it really, really does. What might seem a seemingly inconsequential throwaway comment to you, is actually the stuff which makes the world go around. It's the context, it's the relationship, and nothing is more depressing than being told that what everybody else heard, isn't important enough to repeat to you. It's isolating and the more it happens, the more I become that little lady in the corner of the room, in the corner of life.

My hearing could be worse, I could be profoundly deaf, but it is a problem. For me, and everybody with hearing loss, please practise your very best diction this Christmas and look into our eyes when you speak.

That would be our very best Christmas present and an enormous helping hand through 2017.

PS There is good news for poor hearing. Increased deafness goes hand in hand with an ageing population and scientists and businesses have taken up the challenge. Breakthroughs are coming thick and fast and I am very hopeful for my hearing future and that of everyone currently struggling. Action on Hearing Loss (formerly the RNID) is a charity helping to find cures. If you haven't sent Christmas cards this year and keep meaning to get round to a charity donation instead, please consider supporting Action on Hearing Loss. More information here