Living in the hearing impaired world

I am a hearing impaired person and I feel that I live in two separate worlds. For one I do not hear well enough to consider myself part of the hearing community however I was taught in regular school (mainstreamed to the deaf community) instead of being taught in a deaf school and I don't know sign language so I don't feel integrated with the deaf world either.

When I was first born no one knew that I had problems hearing and in fact I was thought of as a normal child until I was 4 years old. At first the school system wanted to put me in the same classes as the mentally handicapped because they knew I had some sort of disability but wasn't sure what it was. I wasn't talking really talking yet and they were trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

My mother later pulled me from these classes and started to put me into regular classes but I still wasn't learning or developing as quickly as everyone would have hoped. The school ended up testing my hearing and that's when everyone finally realized that I had a hearing disability. To my parents relief I wasn't completely deaf however I did have a severe hearing loss and I would need hearing aids and therapy to get caught up with my now delayed development.

I was 5 years old when I got my first pair of hearing aids. When I put them on I heard sounds I never new existed. The first thing I remember hearing was the wind blowing in from the car window on the way home after getting my hearing aids. I rolled down the window and listened to all the new fresh sounds that I hadn't heard before. When I got home I went into the back yard and started running around trying to hear new things that I hadn't heard before. I heard birds tweeting and singing away and I started to hear the rumble of storm coming up. Then it started to rain and for the first time I learned that rain actually made a noise as it fell to earth. I jumped excited around yelling to my parents how I could hear the rain. They could see my excitement and my mother burst into tears.

Now my life was starting to change since I had hearing aids and I could hear it was time for me to start to learn to speak. I started going through speech therapy in order to learn how to pronounce things correctly. There were still challenges for me at this time as I was exposed to multiple languages all at once. You see I was newly naturalized American trying to learn English however both of my parents were had Spanish as their primary language for some time before I got my hearing aids we lived in Italy, since my father was stationed there, so I was exposed to Italian as well. The school advised my parents that between my hearing impairment and the multiple languages I was exposed to that it would slow down my language development as well.

I continued to get speech therapy until my graduation from high school. By this time I had learned to compensate some of my hearing loss with lip reading as well. I struggled through high school thanks to a problem with math but still managed to graduate so I started off in college.

When I started going to the local community college I became more exposed to the deaf community. I met a girl in my English class who had a hearing disability as well. She happened to have an interpreter and a note taker to assist her in her classes. The interpreter's job of course was to interpret everything that was said in the class room to my friend and to help her speak as well. The note taker took notes for my friend since she was unable to take notes and watch what the interpreter was saying at the same time. I realized what I was missing out on since I have been trying to take my own notes my entire school career but every time I have my head down to take notes I can't read lips so I sometimes misunderstand what is said.

My friend then introduced me to the deaf community at the school soon I was starting to be exposed sign language, interpreter's, note takers, tutoring and other things that the deaf community depended on at school. It made me realize that I had to struggle harder and it seemed more on my own than some of the members of the deaf community that embraced the services available to them.

I started to wonder if I should of been raised in the deaf community, learned sign language and even attended schools and classrooms specially made for the deaf children. I went ahead and requested a note taker to assist me in my classes so I could focus on reading lips during instruction from the teachers. I felt it was already too late at this point to use an interpreter because first I would have to learn sign language before it really became useful to me. My family didn't know sign language so I would only be using this language at school so I decided to skip it for now. I sometimes now wish I learned it while I had the chance as I am much older now.

I later married someone who was not hard of hearing and we had a son who we later found out also had a hearing problem. The good news is I know what challenges I went through and would be able to understand his issues and help him through it. We caught my son's hearing issue at three years old when we noticed he wasn't really speaking. We were testing him before hand but the audiologist had a tough time testing him since he was always fidgiting around and didn't pay attention to the tests. We were able to get our son into speech therapy sooner than I was exposed to it. We got him into the local headstart program to help give him a chance to make it through school easier than I did. We even had a speech therapist come visit our home to teach him as well.

This blog will be about the struggles that both my son and I face every day as we try to integrate in the hearing community even with our challenges. We are fortunate to live in an age of technology and I will explain what advances has helped us and what things we would still like to see. Perhaps you know someone who has similar challenges and you can share you story with us as well. My next post will be about my challenge of starting my first job and how I coped and how things could of gone better.

Till next time

Stuckin2worlds