When I was 13, near the end of Grade 8, I had a general medical exam and the doctor checked my hearing. My mother claims she asked him to do it because she thought I was not attentive and might have a “problem”. I always thought it was a routine check. Anyway, it was not “all right” and he referred me to an ENT and audiologist, who did a proper audiological assessment. I had at that time about a 60 dB loss at 2500 Hz, 90+ above that and sloping up to normal in the low frequencies. The ENT said it was like the hearing of a very old person. My father wanted to know if there was surgery or something (I was thinking, hoping “no, no!”) and the doctor said no there wasn’t and hearing aids wouldn’t do much either (as I understand they wouldn’t back in those days, the late 60s/early 70s). Thus began a series of checkups with no measurable benefit, over the next 5 years or so. Each September, I presented myself to each teacher with the little note from my mother with the dirty secret: “Kathryn has a hearing problem. Please let her sit in the front row.”
I went through high school and university sitting in the front row and surviving with lipreading as my hearing loss crept into the lower frequencies. By the time I was in the last year of university, I had no hearing at all above 1100 Hz. You can see how this eats into speech perception (speech ranging from 300 to 3000 Hz, more or less). The shape of my audiogram was like a low range where the hearing was OK and then a steep slope down to no-hearing. The slope progressively moved to the left of the audiogram, and the rate of decline was about an octave every 10 years. Mathematically, this means that the deterioration from normal hearing began when I was born. By the time I was 10, it would have been interfering with comprehension.
It wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that I started to realize I couldn’t just pretend I was doing everything okay. Being bright helps, because mindreading goes a long way. If you can figure out the few most likely things someone will say, it helps you guess what they are actually saying. I was making serious errors on the telephone. I decided to stop using the telephone and have my secretary handle all the calls. I got hearing aids at that point, mainly to make a personal statement that people would have to start reckoning with my hearing loss. I used them for a couple of years, and I do still put them on when I want people to see that I am making an effort. What I hear with the hearing aids is basically the sound it makes when you bang two pots together, in time with the speech—or whatever the dominant environmental noise is—at about 120 decibels. Bang bang bang. If I wear them for one day, my ears ring for three or four days afterwards.
I started to learn sign language when I was about 30, and I don’t waste the energy on lipreading as much as I used to when I didn’t have the choice. After one year in classes, I had enough receptive skills to start using interpreters in professional situations, and it was night-and-day easier and more effective for me.
My personal feelings really have run the gamut, although I can’t say I have spent more than .001% of the time regretting I couldn't hear, as such. <Here's one example.> Another situation where I have wished for 10 minutes of hearing is getting stuck in an airport somewhere that has no TTY and no way to get a taxi or a bus to my hotel. Really, since I acquired the ability to sign, it has not been all that awful. Having a deaf husband and deaf friends is a comfort. When I was married to a hearing man, he just didn’t understand, and thought it was all a matter of me making more effort. It is easier and less invasive for a hearing person to learn to sign than it is for a deafened person to jump through all sorts of hoops, taking special lipreading classes, having implants put in their heads, carrying around all kinds of equipment just so a hearing person doesn’t have to do anything differently. (The deafened person has gone through all that change inside himself, and he has to do more to keep change from affecting others?) Just a thought.
How I was deafened
This is how many people it takes to look like you are standing by yourself on a bridge.
If you really, really want my biography published, write me a nice letter and I will quote you to publishers when I get around to submitting it!
