Coping With Hearing Loss
By Connie Briscoe
ddly enough,
I've come to think that losing my hearing was one of the best things that
ever happened to me, as it led to the publication of my first novel. But
it took a while for me
 to
accept that my hearing loss was getting worse and that I needed help.
I believe that no matter
how tough things get, you can make them better. I have my parents to thank
for that. They never allowed me to think that I couldn't accomplish
something because of my hearing loss. One of my mother's favorite sayings
when I expressed doubt that I could do something was, "Yes, you can."
I was born with a mild
hearing loss but began to lose more of my hearing when I was a senior
in college. One day while sitting in my college dormitory room reading, I
noticed my roommate get up from her bed, go to the princess telephone in
our room, pick it up and start talking. None of that would have seemed
strange, except for one thing: I never heard the telephone ring! I
wondered why I couldn't hear a phone that I could hear just the day
before. But I was too baffled--and embarrassed--to say anything to my
roommate or to anyone else.
Late-deafened people can
always remember the moments when they first stopped being able to hear the
important things in life like telephones and doorbells ringing, people
talking in the next room, or the television. It's sort of like remembering
where you were when you learned that President Kennedy had been shot or
when you learned about the terror attack at the World
Trade
Center.
Unbeknown to me at the
time, that was only the beginning of my downward spiral, as my hearing
grew progressively worse. But I was young and still vain enough not to
want to buy
hearing aids. I struggled through college by sitting up front in the
classroom, straining to read lips and asking people to speak up, sometimes
again and again.
By the time I entered
graduate school, I could no longer put it off. My hearing loss was
substantial, and I knew that I had to buy a hearing aid. By then, even
sitting in front of the classroom wasn't helping much. I was still vain
enough to wait a few months while I let my hair grow out a bit before
taking the plunge but I eventually did buy a hearing aid. It was a big,
clunky thing, but I knew that I would have to be able to hear if I ever
wanted to graduate.
Soon, my hair length
didn't matter much, as the hearing aids got smaller and smaller. They also
got better and better at picking up sound. The early aids did little more
than make sounds louder evenly across the board. That doesn't work for
those of us with nerve deafness, as we may have more hearing loss in the
high frequencies than in the lower ones. The newer digital and
programmable hearing aids go a long way toward improving on that. They can
be set to match different types of hearing loss, so you can, say, increase
a particular high frequency more than other frequencies.
Once I got my
hearing aid and was able to hear again, I could focus on other things
that were important to me--like my education, my career and writing that
first novel! I didn't realize it then, but that first hearing aid actually
freed me to go on to bigger and better things.
I had long dreamed of
writing a novel, but like others kept putting it off. As I began to lose
more and more of my hearing, it was a chore just to keep up at work, let
alone doing much else. Then once I got the hearing aid, I no longer had to
worry about a lot of the things I did before, and I began to think that
writing a novel would be the perfect hobby for me. Anyone can write
regardless of whether they can hear. I was also determined to prove that
losing my hearing would not hold me back.
My first novel was
published in 1994 and my fifth in the summer of 2005. Writing turned out
to be much more than a hobby, as I've been writing full-time for more than
10 years. I'm now hard at work on my first nonfiction work, a photo-essay
book to be published in 2007. I honestly believe that I would never have
sat down at the computer and banged out that first novel if I hadn't lost
so much of my hearing. Instead, I'd probably still be an editor somewhere
and still dreaming about someday becoming a novelist. That's why I
sometimes think that losing my hearing was one of the best things that
ever happened to me.
Connie Briscoe is a New York Times best-selling author and a former
managing editor of American Annals of the deaf, a journal on deaf
education. She runs a website to empower other hearing-impaired people at
www.hearinginformer.com.
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