I’m okay, I’m just hard of hearing.

One day I was with my son at the bank waiting in line.  My son was wearing his hearing aids that day since he was still just five and didn’t have any issues with people seeing him wearing them.  A woman was standing behind us in line and noticed my son’s hearing aids.  She took a tone with me and insinuated that I used to lay my son down in his crib with a bottle when he was a baby.  She basically accused me of being a bad mother and causing my son to have a hearing loss. I knew how to raise a baby.  I had taken classes and in fact I used to be a day care teacher so I knew a lot.  My son was also born premature so both my hubby and I attended some classes to learn more about how to take care of him. Anyway back to the woman who was being rude to me.  I was infuriated with her comments so I raised up my hair to show her my hearing aids and in a loud tone told her no that I have a hearing loss and that my son inherited his hearing loss.  She then realized that she overstepped her boundaries and perhaps she learned not to pass judgment so quickly.

Another day I was standing in line at the local pharmacy to pick up a prescription.  It was probably hot because I had my hair in a pony tail and my hearing aids were showing.  My son again was with me and was wearing his hearing aids.  A man was behind us and saw us both and for some reason felt sorry for us.  He actually offered me money for some reason and felt that I needed it.  I declined but he kept becoming persistent and at one point opened my hand and put the money in my hand.  I refused again and gave him back the money.  I was embarrassed because there were other people around watching what was going on.  I normally don’t try to draw attention to myself and this guy wasn’t helping.  I didn’t want my son to think that just because he has a hearing problem that he should expect handouts.  I know in the past I have been at restaurants and some will come by and drop off little key chains or something that they are selling with a note attached that they are deaf and that they sell these items as a means of living. I wonder if the man thought I was in the same situation but just because you are deaf doesn’t mean you need a handout.

 

Many deaf and hard of hearing people are in the every day work place.  I work at a pet store where I deal with the public.  I know of people who work in the schools or even in a library like Megan who writes the Hearing Sparks Blog.  Most hearing impaired and deaf people want to contribute to society just as any other person.  The only thing I would ask someone is to understand that I may not be able to hear you so you may have to speak up. 

Importance of Speech Therapy

Speech therapy is, I think , the most important part of getting a hearing impaired child to lead a normal life. In the past 37 years of my dealing with this disability, I took 13 years of speech therapy. I originally started my speech therapy classes at 5 years old not long after getting my first pair of hearing aids.

The first part of speech therapy started out by teaching me how to pronounce letters individually and then moved into joined letters such as “ch or sh”. Even though I don’t hear a huge difference in some of this it was still important for me to be able to pronounce it correctly.

When it was time for me to start school I was able to attend regular classes that the other hearing kids attended. I was pulled out of English class in order to do my speech therapy. I didn’t quite understand why they would pull me out of that class as it was an important class and figured I could benefit from attending it.

I continued to take speech therapy all the way through high school and again they continued to pull me out of English class. I would of hoped at the higher levels they would of pulled me out of social studies or some other class but English is an important class especially if you are planning on continuing in higher education.

On my senior year of high school I had decided that I finally had enough of speech therapy. I could already speak fairly well and really was just getting a little tired of it. I had already picked up other skills besides just the speech therapy. I of course had picked up the ability to read lips and the ability to read body language as well. I was often able to tell how someone felt just on their body language. It’s kept me out of trouble be avoiding situations where I could tell someone was in a bad mood or perhaps dangerous. Reading lips also helps when the hearing aids are not working as well or the environment is too noisy. I can even read lips from another room or through a window and be able to see what a couple is saying to one another. It makes for interesting dinner conversation when you are able to tell your dinner partner what someone across the room is talking about.

When I started college some people didn’t necessarily believe that I had as a severe of a hearing problem as I did because I was able to speak pretty well and able to pronounce most things. I was able to get some assistance in college eventually in which I got a note taker to assist me in taking notes while I read the teachers lips. I met some of the other hearing impaired students at the college and was able to compare the different hearing and speaking abilities. I was told that my deaf accent was not as profound as some of the others but while I had an easier time speaking verbally I really didn’t know sign language which made things more difficult in communicating with the other hearing impaired students.

Speech therapy has helped me a lot with my job as well since I work retail and have to speak a lot with customers. The customers usually don’t have any issues understanding me but I have been known to having issues not understanding them. I sometimes have to ask folks to repeat things and some will respond well and some loose their patience. I have been known to respond to the rude ones by showing them my hearing aids so that they understand that I cannot hear them correctly. They are usually more sympathetic then and speak a little louder. My only request is that they don’t try to speak slower and stretch their lips wider. I can read them just fine if they speak normal.

Since I knew that I benefited so much from speech therapy I made sure that my son started receiving speech therapy at an early age. If you were to talk to him you wouldn’t believe you were talking with a hearing impaired kid. Part of that is ability to pronounce things well, part of it is from his reading which gave him a strong vocabulary and some of it is him being stubborn and pretending like he doesn’t have a problem.

So as a final comment I would suggest for anyone in similiar situation to go ahead and get the speech therapy. It will give you confidence when communicating and help you feel better about yourself. If you know of someone who could use speech therapy find a nice way to suggest looking into it. I’ve been known to suggest it to friends and family who have benefited from it. It could be for you or for someone you love.

The many benefits of closed captioning

Back in the days we didn’t have closed caption, it was the most frustrating thing to deal with, I keep increasing the volume on the TV louder and louder until my parents would yell at me”Turn it down!”.

I couldn’t help but to want to turn the volume up and up since I didn’t want to miss anything that they were saying on the TV. Just before I graduated from high school I went to the local community deaf and hard of hearing center and they helped me apply for a voucher to get a new closed caption box to connect to the TV. I was so excited the day when my magic box arrived and it was time to connect it to my TV. Within a matter of minutes I saw words coming out on the bottom of my screen and I was able to read what they were saying. I said “finally, now i can watch TV!” Over time I started to decrease the volume on my TV and get used to closed captions. Closed captioning is the most wonderful to thing to have in the hard of hearing and deaf world. I actually felt l that i can be part of the world again.

Over time I learned there were many benefits to closed captioning. For one you can actually watch TV in the living room and if other people are talking you are not interrupting them. It also helps when someone is trying to talk on the telephone and now you are not blaring the television so they are able to hear clearly on the telephone. Our son has watched closed captioned television from birth and it appears that he is very strong in reading comprehension. Teachers have told us that he is able to read at multiple grade levels above him and are surprised at some of the words he is able to understand. My husband is a huge movie geek and loves to hear every word. With closed captioning he is able to tell what is going on in even with the actors are whispering. We were even surprised on our first film where even the swear words would spelled out in closed captioning

One day we decided to upgrade our television to a new flat screen and my husband bought a HDMI cable to hook up the DVD player to the new television. We started to play a movie and to our shock there was no closed caption. We started fumbling through the book on the television and through DVD player to see what the issue was. Later through some research on the internet we found out that the HDMI signal does not pass by the Closed Caption convertor that is internal to the television set. If we were to watch something over the air waves it would but for some reason the HDMI signaling bypasses it and therefore there would be no more closed captioning for us. If you used standard Audio/Video jacks those signals do pass by the closed caption decoder so our VCR actually works still. For DVD’s though the movie industry has figured out that this is an issue and now makes sure that there are always English subtitles on new movies. Subtitles do not have everything in them that closed captioning did such as environment sounds and a lot of time you will not see the words to a song in subtitles even though you would in closed captioning. I think the song lyrics has something to do with licenses that subtitles are regulated by but closed captioning was exempt to.

We are now pleased with our new television, and we recently got digital cable and made sure our box would convert the closed captioning and transmit it through our HDMI cable. Overall closed captioning has made life easier on me and my son and I’m glad it’s around.

Playing On-line video games with voice chat

 

My husband and I loved to play RPG games online and we tried out multiple Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG).  The first few games we played I really enjoyed playing since I got to talk to so many different people from all around the country.  I was able to type in order to communicate with them. 

In the games we would form organizations known as guilds in which we would work together to achieve a common goal.  In one previous games known as Horizons: Empire of Istaria we were able to work together to build our own houses and shops. Sometimes we would gather together and hunt together since it was safer to work together as a group.

Later my husband and I moved on to a game known as World of Warcraft.  In the initial stages we were able to form a small guild and make some friends to socialize with and to go explore dungeons with.  Most of these dungeons would have 5-10 players accompany you and they were not very difficult and could be played pretty much just for fun and perhaps some new gear for your character.

As we progressed in the game it came to a point where we needed to participate in larger scale dungeons known as raids.  These had up to 40 players participating in order to bring down some of the boss level monsters. 

The amount of coordination required in order to achieve success in the raids was quite a bit.  There was just too much instructions that needed to be given to individual players that it didn’t make a lot of sense to type it all out.  Many guilds moved to voice chat programs such as Teamspeak or Ventrilo.  Our guild used Ventrilo and it allowed you to chat through a headset and speakers in order to hear one another.  It was intresting technology since 40 people were able to communicate with one another at the same time via voice chat.

 

Being a hearing impaired person though made it difficult for me I had to rig my headset to a speaker that allowed me to crank up the volume.  I had my analog hearing aids at the time so I would try putting the headset on my hearing aids or sometimes go without.  It also didn’t help that I had an important role in the raid.  I had the role of an off-tank which basically means I had the job of keeping the big boss angry at me so all my friends could pound it to death.  If our main tank went down I had to leap in and take over or perhaps during certain encounters we had to coordinate switching between the two of us.  The required me to hear when it was my turn to do something.

Sadly the game became more and more difficult and my hearing wasn’t getting better so my husband and I stopped participating in the raids.  It didn’t help that him and I were doing some smaller level stuff together and would see the guild mates cheer that they had just accomplished something massive.  We eventually gave up on the game and stopped playing all together and cancelled our accounts.

Now that I got my new Opticon digital hearing aids and use the streamer I am able to plug my computer into the streamer and I can hear just fine.  We haven’t gone back to gaming though since we are now focused on other things but I wish I had this technology earlier.

Opticon Digital Hearing Aids and my experience with them.

I wrote in my previous blogs about my challenges I had using cell phones with my hearing aids. When I was having problems at work hearing on the phone and understanding customers that were talking to me I went to look for help. I made an appointment with the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services (DARS). My DARS counselor explained to me that there were many new advances in hearing assistive devices and sent to an audiologist for a new hearing test and to determine what would be for me.

My meeting with my audiologist gave me a lot of hope. He explained that the hearing aids I was wearing was old technology and that I should try out some new digital hearing aids made by Opticon. He told me that I would hear things more clearly and I would pick up sounds that I normally didn't pick up with the older analog hearing aids. So he took new ear mold impressions and ordered my new hearing aids.


It wasn't very long and soon I was back at the audiologist getting new hearing aids fitted and programmed. He also surprised me by showing me that these hearing aids came with an extra device known as a streamer that communicated to my hearing aids via wireless communication. The device is can communicate with my cell phone using blue tooth technology. You see folks walking around all the time with a blue tooth device in their ear and now this streamer device will do the same thing for me but instead transmit the sound directly into my hearing aids. The sound quality of a cell phone call is just amazing compared to what I was used to. The other neat feature is you can plug your MP3 player or iPod into the stream and play music directly into your hearing aids. I immediately went home and plugged my MP3 player into the streamer and started listening to my favorite music.

When I got my new T-Mobile Gravity 2 phone my husband went ahead and purchased the 4 Gigabyte SD card. I already knew that this phone was compatible to my streamer to handle calls via blue tooth but what about the music player option on the phone? We loaded up some of my favorite songs on the the SD card and decided to test it out. I was actually very surprised to be hearing music streaming into my ears with no wires attached to my ear or streamer. It worked like a charm and have been very happy with the new phone and streamer combo.

With all the things I do like about the hearing aids they do happen to have some draw-backs. First off the hearing aids were designed to filter out background noises so when I'm at work or in a restaurant I can focus on the person talking to me. So what's the bad thing? Well it appears that what is also missing is environmental noises as well such as background music, birds or noises in a distance. I sometimes feel that I cannot hear any of my surroundings and it bugs me.

On top of the surrounding issue I was used to individual volume controls on my analog hearing aids however my new hearing aids work together and if I turn up the volume on one it turns up on both. If I'm hearing too much in one ear and not enough in the other then my only option is to go back to the audiologist and have him reprogram the hearing aids. After getting these hearing aids I reported back to the audiologist five times in just two months for adjustments for sound.

I have also had to report back to the audiologist multiple times because the hearing aids have stopped working correctly. I have had to have internal and external speakers replaced on them a few times already. I have had the hearing aids sent in for repairs twice and it hasn't even been a year since I have had them.

These hearing aids also require a new mold that require a lot of maintenance by the user. You must buy little rubber wax stoppers to help prevent wax from going into the mold. This doesn't seem like a bad idea except for how often you end up changing them. This also requires me to visit the audiologist often just to buy refills of the was stoppers.

These hearing aids also use a smaller battery than my analogs and have to be replaced within a week and a half compared to my old hearing aids where a battery would last for three weeks. I think part of this issue is the fact that the hearing aids have off button. Yes that is correct no easy way to turn off the hearing aids. I'm told by the audiologist that you pull the battery out of the hearing aids to turn them off. This is very inconvenient when I'm laying down for the night and leave my hearing aids on the nightstand. If I wake up and need to hear something I must put the battery in and close it and then power on the hearing aids. I've been known to loose a few batteries because of this very issue.

Talking on the cell phone

When my husband got his first cell phone I tried to hear on it and wow I got a ton of feedback from his phone. In fact it got to the point that I would hate to sit next to him while he was on the phone because of the intense buzzing that would go on in my ears. I'm sure some of you out there have heard computer speakers going crazy when someones cell phone is getting ready to ring. Now just imagine that right in your ear, I can assure you it's not pleasant.

So if a cell phone does that just being near me then how am I supposed to use one? Well at first we tried to find some phones that were just really loud and I would take my hearing aid out and try to hear without it. This really didn't work out that well and of course since I couldn't hear that well I was then yelling in the phone assuming the person on the other end cannot hear me as well so basically everyone around me can hear in detail both ends of the call.

My husband made it his mission to find a cell phone that would be compatible with my hearing aid. The first problem we ran into was we were using T-mobile service and at that time there were not many T-mobile phones compatible to hearing aids. In fact the signalling that T-mobile used for communications was different than many other providers and that caused some of the issues I was having with the cell phones. After some further research we learned that clam-shelled style phones work better for people with hearing aids as the antenna is further away from the ear than other phones.

My husband was a Nokia fan at the time and did some research on Nokia's website to see that were aware of the issues with cell phones and hearing aids. In fact they created a loop that could plug into your phone and wear around your neck into order to create a t-coil effect so your hearing aids would work better with the phone. We actually knew of someone that used this with their Nokia phone.




We continued to do more research and found out about HAC ratings on cell phones that the FCC started to enforce. The rating scale ranges from 1 to 4. The four possibilities are: M1 or T1 (poor), M2 or T2 (fair), M3 or T3 (good) and M4 or T4 (excellent). We made it our goal to find at least a M3 or T3 phone. Again T-Mobile phones seemed to max out at that level but Verizon, Sprint and other providers had M4/T4 rated phones. We ended up getting a Samsung phone and when I used it I would leave my hearing aids in my ear and leave it in normal mode and I could hear okay but of course I had hoped for better.

I later had found out that some of my issues were due to the fact that I was using analog hearing aids and that it was time for me to move to the digital age. Moving to digital hearing aids opened up many different opportunities for me but that is something I will save for next time.

Challenges listening on the telephone

One of my many challenges of being a hearing impaired person is actually trying to hear on a telephone. Growing up I was fortunate enough to get an amplified telephone so that I could hear well enough on the house phone. This of course didn't do me much good when when I went to a friends house or tried to use a phone booth. Phone booths were supposed to have increased volume but most of them I tried out really didn't seem to have the feature set up correctly plus they didn't appear to be compatible to my hearing aid when I switch them to phone mode.

I tried using an adapter that went over the handset in order to increase the volume on other phones but that didn't seem to work that well.

I started to really run into problems when I started working since the phones at work were tied into large PBX phone systems and of course they weren't compatible with my hearing aid since they didn't have the t-coil in them. At one job I tried explaining the difficulties I was having on the phone and how my co-workers kept pressuring me to answer the phone but the office manager wasn't any help. I showed her a catalog of phones that were specially designed for hearing impaired folks that could probably be compatible with their phone system but they weren't interested in looking at them. I guess they really weren't concerned with the requirements of the American Disabilities Act. I ended up not sticking around the job because it was clear between co-workers and the office manager that they didn't have any compassion for my challenges and in fact they acted as if I was using it as a crutch. I think one of reasons I have that issue is the fact that I speak very well for a hearing impaired person but that's mainly due to how much speech therapy I've gone through. The fact that I had to quit actually traumatized me a bit and made me feel that I couldn't make it in the work environment and really lowered my self esteem.

At home my amplified phone finally gave out after many years of use. I went to the local community deaf and hard of hearing center and they helped me apply for a voucher to get a new phone. Once I got the voucher I was able to get a new phone that actually had closed caption on it. Wow! A phone with closed captioning? Sounded like a great idea but unfortunately some of my calls are in Spanish and the phone was unable to translate Spanish speaking into closed captioning and would just report that the caller was speaking a foreign language. I ended up giving up on the phone because honestly it was not amplified enough compared to my original phone. I also strangely had really large buttons as if I was more visually impaired that hearing impaired



I won't even get started yet on cell phones as that is entirely a whole new story perhaps I will share that next time.