People tend to wonder how someone who’s deaf can still lose hearing.\u00a0 And why, though the person has no speech understanding, hearing aids help her read lips and she can’t read well without them.\u00a0 Of course, that person is me.\u00a0 I was telling someone that I’ve lost more hearing and she couldn’t understand how you can be deaf and still lose more heairng.\u00a0 It’s a fair question, but\u00a0when she\u00a0said to me, “Can you be deafer?”\u00a0\u00a0I couldn’t help but laugh.\u00a0 \u00a0I think it was an innocent question – after all, either you can hear or you can’t, right?<\/p>\n
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Well, no, that’s wrong. Hearing loss and\u00a0sounds are complicated. Sounds are in different frequencies and\u00a0can be heard at different volume levels. You can be profoundly deaf\u00a0and still have a few frequencies with sounds left – until you don’t.\u00a0 Which is where I am now. I’m out of frequencies and decibels.<\/p>\n
The bright side is, I can sleep on the runway of an airport and the\u00a0sound of the plane won’t wake me up. Of course the down side to that is that I’ll get run over and squished by the plane, but that’s a whole different ball game.\u00a0\u00a0In reality, sleeping on the runway isn’t part of my plans.\u00a0 But in reality, I’m not communicating too well. You can always tell I’m in trouble when I do a lot of the talking.\u00a0 If I’m talking, I don’t have to hear and I don’t have to suffer through uncomfortable silences.<\/p>\n
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This time with the new hearing aids\u00a0has been\u00a0interesting.\u00a0 There are moments I think I’m doing better,\u00a0but overall\u00a0I’m not.\u00a0 But they have such amazing features, it’s\u00a0frustrating me terribly\u00a0that they’re probably not going to work for me.\u00a0 For instance, they have a “sound recovery” system.\u00a0 That means they take the sounds and move them\u00a0to the frequencies that do work for you.\u00a0\u00a0 Like playing an instrument in another key!<\/p>\n
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Unfortunately I don’t have the frequencies to put them in so they bounce around and around and they echo.\u00a0 The bad\u00a0part\u00a0of that is I can’t hear and they drive me crazy. The\u00a0amusing part is that I can sing a duet with myself and it always sounds like I’m in a crowd!\u00a0\u00a0 Finally I have imaginary friends.\u00a0 I wish they’d say something different though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
People tend to wonder how someone who’s deaf can still lose hearing.\u00a0 And why, though the person has no speech understanding, hearing aids help her read lips and she can’t read well without them.\u00a0 Of course, that person is me.\u00a0 I was telling someone that I’ve lost more hearing and she couldn’t understand how you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lostmyhearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}