Don’t Shout Damn It
I can hear you. I just don’t understand you.
I can hear you. I just don’t understand you.
According to some hearing resource sites I have visited lately, the term Hearing Impaired is frowned upon. The preferred term is Hard of Hearing.
I dislike Hard of Hearing. I mean think about all the many disabilities that we develop. Do we say Hard of Seeing? Is someone Hard of Moving?
My wife is afflicted with a condition that is destroying her visual fields. She was a teen when the genes she was cursed with began doing their damage. She has had numerous surgeries to mitigate the problem… She is not blind as is our stereotype of blind, but she qualified for a disability pension before sixty-five. She is visually impaired.
Somewhere during my journey, I began to hear a few little things. Those little things became more than a few. Now I hear a lot of little things. Like most little things, they are just noise. Just random noise that is really annoying at times. The hearing doctor labelled it as tinnitus. My hearing is impaired.
We make a good pair, my wife and I, don’t we?
My Tinnitus
As I understand it, tinnitus is caused by the cilia in the inner ear dying. That would be the little hairs that detect the sound waves captured by the ear drum. When they die, the nerve that connected it to the hearing center of the brain starts to guess what its cilia are saying. They turn into chatty Kathys and won’t shut up.
For me, this means I can’t hear the high-pitched frequencies. These are the noises that we hate — like the buzz of insects. And those we love — like the song of a red-winged blackbird.
I have a pair of hearing aids. Hearing aids are just that, aids, they are not hearing cures. I wear my hearing aids when I watch TV and visit with people. They help but they aren’t perfect, they are aids, they are an imperfect crutch. A wheelchair.
Living with a disability
My wife will be quite pissed with this article. She does not like people to be aware of her disability. She has kept it well hidden and won’t talk about it. In our youth, a disability was a curse. Not a curse because of the limitations of the disability, but a curse that labelled you as imperfect. A cripple. In our youth, cripples were pittied or laughed at so of course, you would want to hide it if you had one.
During our many years of marriage, we have adapted to my wife’s vision impairment. It is something that has always been there. As her vision has deteriorated, we, and her doctors, have found ways to adapt. Her passion is fabric arts. You would be hard-pressed to find someone more skilled around a sewing machine than her. Even with the technological advancements in the field, I can’t comprehend how she can do the things she does with her limited vision.
My disability, hearing loss, is similar to my wife’s vision loss in that it is not readily apparent. You will not see her with a white cane, or funky dark glasses just as my hearing aids are not readily apparent.
Communication is verbal
Hearing loss, however, impairs my ability to communicate. As my impairment has progressed, I have developed coping methods without even knowing. I unconsciously read lips for example. I wouldn’t be able to watch a conversation through binoculars and recite it, but the pattern your lips make when you speak helps me decode what you are saying. One thing that doesn’t help is raising your voice. The problem with tinnitus and losing the ability to hear high frequencies is that it is not related to volume. Shout all you like, but I will still not understand because I’m still missing part of the picture.
Accents and soft-spoken high-pitched women are a particular problem. Telephone conversations with someone who speaks fast… well there are a lot of requests for them to slow down. I need some time to decode what is being said. TV shows — a challenge — Ted Laso takes a huge effort for me to follow the dialogue. Often, I’m not up for it.
Looking for understanding
This rant was precipitated by an event while my wife and I were watching TV recently. She was paying attention to the show and the sewing project in her lap when she made a remark. I didn’t understand what she said and asked her to repeat it. Several times. By the fourth time, her frustration with me was more than obvious.
Most times, when we are angry, we are angry with ourselves. We are angry at our inability to get our ideas across. Trouble is anger projects. Our frustration and anger project onto the other person who now feels diminished. My inability to understand what was being said caused a reaction and an escalation. Rather than thinking to choose different words, or to pause, the reaction was to repeat the same phrase while raising the voice. Doesn’t matter how loud you shout, if the other person doesn’t understand your language then you aren’t going to communicate.
And there is the crux of the matter. I don’t hear proper English anymore. I hear my own special dialect. It’s not rhyming slang or Cockney, but it might just as well be. There are times when I have no clue what was said because I couldn’t decode and translate it. Group conversations become quite challenging and tiring. I avoid them. Haven’t sat in a bar with buddies for quite a while.
Pity. Nope. Don’t want it. Somebody with a disability doesn’t want your pity, they want your understanding. If I meet you and mention I am hard of hearing, don’t say you’re sorry. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I am so sorry to have to ask you to repeat yourself.
If you meet someone who is looking for pity, then that person is indeed pitiable.
What we all need to do is understand each other and help each other progress in our journey.
About Rover Dave
I am but a visitor to this world looking to discover its beauty and enjoy the people whom I may meet along my way.
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