More questions about hearing loss
I recently gave a 20-minute keynote about hearing loss. The reviews and responses were overwhelmingly positive.
The title of the talk is “WHAT? 10 Questions Most Often asked about Hearing Loss” The talk is based on my experience as a person with hearing loss and a lifetime of questions asked of me concerning the deficiency. This is a spinoff from the overview post of the questions about hearing loss talk. This post covers questions 5-7.
Remember, as explained in the overview post – we hear (meaning comprehending and understanding sounds) with our brains, not our ears. If you turn on your TV to a foreign film and turn off the captioning, you hear, yes, but you do not understand. Why? Because our BRAIN has not been trained to understand those particular “sounds.”
7. Can you drive?
Yes. I can and do drive. However, there are precautions I take as a driver. Because I must read lips and body language to hear fully, I cannot really “listen” while I am driving. When my best buddy and business partner and I take road trips, she drives. Even if we are in my car, she drives so her eyes stay on the road. As a result, we can have real two-way conversations. If the person driving the vehicle you are riding in has a hearing loss, it is best to let them carry the bulk of the conversation. You can talk in detail once they are no longer driving and can look at you.
Back seat passengers don’t get it! I need we need to read lips!
Even after I explain my limitations if backseat drivers insist on talking to me while I’m driving, all I need to do is turn my head all the way around to look at them. They get the message pretty quickly. A workaround is the rearview mirror. If others are in the back seat, I try to adjust my rearview mirror to see their lips. If I’m in the back seat, I ask the driver to adjust their mirror so I can see their lips.
I pay attention to traffic patterns. Why? I have a difficult time hearing sirens.
I’ve had two pretty close calls impatiently swerving around a driver who seems to be stopped for an excessive amount of time at a green light or stop sign. NOW I wait and look around. Are other cars pulling over? Chances are likely they hear an approaching emergency vehicle or police car. Of course, you are in the same danger if you blast your radio so loud you cannot hear anything going on outside.
6. How does a cochlear implant work? Do you hear normally?
Ha. Boy, don’t I wish!
A hearing aid amplifies speech. The hope is the softer components of speech are discernable. A cochlear implant is not a super-powered hearing aid. It is an apparatus that turns sounds into electronic waves. What a huge disappointment when the big day came to turn on my cochlear implant and all I could hear would electronic beeps, squeaks, and burps! The moment was captured on video.
Speech rehabilitation is required
A cochlear implant recipient must undergo speech rehabilitation to take those sounds and train the brain to understand them as speech. The degree to which a person is able to clearly understand speech with a CI depends on many factors. One of the most important is how long the recipient has llived with hearing loss.
Infants and children who receive Cis benefit the most! Their brain does not have years of training on interpreting speech in a certain way. Similarly, if an adult receives a cochlear implant shortly after hearing loss, the rehabilitation period is usually much shorter because, again, the brain has not had years of training on interpreting sounds from the diminished hearing.
For someone like me, whose brain has been trained for most of my life to hear with the deficiency, it requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 hours of serious focus rehabilitation. There are several rehabilitation programs on line, free, to help with this rehab. My audiologist suggested I listen to books on tape with the book available to look up words I don’t understand. I never did that. I am just too impatient for that. So, five years after receiving the cochlear implant, speech is still a bit fuzzy if relying solely on the CI.
But there’s the environment!
On the plus side of an implant, I can hear environmental sounds I’ve never heard before. Birds, feet shuffling on the floor, and even the breathing pattern of my husband when he begins to fall asleep while watching tv next to me. I relish the many sounds of nature the CI enables me to hear.. But speech, well, that’s a different story.
The expectations
It’s not like I was not warned about the limitations of a cochlear implant. Before I received the CI, the audiologist read to me this list of what NOT to expect from a CI. I paid little attention to it because I figured I’m different and I’ll hear just fine once it is turned on. You can read the list here.
If I had to do it over, knowing what I know now, would I still get a cochlear implant? That is a difficult question for me to answer – and a moot point anyhow.
7. Do you hear normally with a hearing aid?
Ha! Boy, don’t I wish? That hearing aids restore one to perfect hearing is a nasty myth.
My hearing aid is a godsend of help. I appreciate it beyond measure. However, it in no way restore me to perfect hearing. In fact, hearing aids rarely do for anyone. My rule of thumb when it comes to hearing aids is this: If you see a person wearing a hearing aid, do not assume they have perfect hearing. See it as a sign to take that little extra effort to make sure they “hear” you.
A sad occurrence that often happens is when a person gets a hearing aid and family and friends no longer make any effort to communicate. They presume the person has perfect, or at least good, hearing. It is a disappointment to both the hearing aid recipient and those close folks who believe in this nasty myth.
Coming Soon. Questions 8-10:
The concluding post will cover these final questions:
- How come sometimes you hear fine, and other times you are totally lost?
- What can I do to help my mom/dad/uncle/friend who is losing their hearing? It seems shouting doesn’t help.
- Have these past months of the covid era been difficult with everyone wearing masks?
