The Question: Is it easier to start wearing hearing aids earlier in life?

In fact late-deafened people have a terrible time compared to us. Hearing people don’t realise how sound-oriented the world is, until it stops. Deaf people listen, hearing people just hear.

Support for late deafened people is not all that wonderful. They need therapy, lots of talking and reassurance. It is fairly common for newly deafened people to have a nervous breakdown. I once met a man who had become deafened as the result of a silly accident. he tripped over his shoelace and fell down some stairs. He ended up with concussion and a total lack of hearing.

This had an enormous effect on his life. he lost his job, he could no longer use the phone of a walkie talkie. His wife was totally stressed out, she didn’t know how to handle this change and there wasn’t a lot of support. It was slowly killing the pair of them.

Fortunately support was found before things got too serious but he had a nasty attack of depression which carried on to his wife and for a few years their life was grim indeed. They got through it in the end but it was a serious upheaval and an ordeal for all.

That seems to be just about typical of a late deafened person. Not very nice, is it? Fortunately Cochlear Implants can help a lot here because people who have already had some hearing adapt better to CI’s than people who have never heard sound. So there is hope for some, at least.

Charlie’s reflective article about being Deaf since birth / early childhood is significant about one concept – the lack of the sense of ‘loss’.
Yet as previous Limping Chicken articles revealed, we Deafies who do not have that sense of loss about our ‘hearing loss’ get assaulted almost on a daily basis “Oh poor you” “Oh dear, what a shame” with constant ‘swear thought bubbles’ at stupid barriers like doing online forms forcing us to insert phone numbers we would not use aurally, mumbling lippatterns of healthcare staff, unnecessary small talk, etc…

Irene Winn’s comment resounds for many of us Deafies with good speech – several of us had to make more effort than our friends with ‘less than good speech’ to convince BOTH the Deaf and hearing worlds that we are Deaf, FULL STOP, and need access anyway in the hearing world.

We all know there is one good solution to lessen the idiotic assumptions and the social isolation of being deaf and deafened – constant top-profile media-savvy Deaf Awareness on the same level as cancer awareness in society.

At school, i was fitted with a free digital hearing aid just before lunch. Upon entering main dining room, the noises were unbearable and of course after that I never wore it again. Pity what a waste of money.

I think this is a very good point. I’ve been wearing hearing aids since I was 10 months old and I’ve never known any different. I detest the term “hearing loss” in my case cos I never had the hearing to lose – I don’t feel like I have lost anything.

I didn’t have earmoulds but an alice band bone conductor aid so adjusting to a hearing aid was a slightly different process. My mum says I would flick it off if there was an unpleasant sound that I didn’t like. While my family are not deaf my mum always made it clear she knew some sounds through hearing aids were unpleasant or more difficult to deal with. She attended a lot of NDCS lectures and did loads of research about what sound might have sounded like to deaf people.

As a child I wore my hearing aid except when I was in the water; I even slept in it because I found it too scary to sleep otherwise. As I have got older I turn my aids off a lot more, avoid processing sound that I don’t have to because that is tiring. It is only in my 30s I’ve met an audiologist who (works with deaf people every day) recognised this as a valid coping mechanism and not deaf people being “naughty” or “lazy”. I now turn mine off when I’m alone a lot of the time and my colleagues are used to the “hang on, 2 second turning on sequence” or better still the “Oh crap I’ve dropped the hearing aid and can’t find it!” sequence 🙂

While people do need to wear their aids to acclimatise, I also argue more work could be done about letting people know it’s OK to take them out for a while if they’re exhausting. People who lose hearing have such a lot of get used to and it may be easier to build up to using aids rather than too much at once. My mum, now herself a teacher of the deaf lost half her hearing last year and says it’s been a fascinating experience to become someone who has to listen rather than someone who can now no longer hear.

I too would like to see better, more flexible, more comprehensive support for anyone who loses hearing plus a lot of peer support where possible (where peers are remunerated for their time/energy too). I know on the BAHA group I’ve run for years having to say to people “A BAHA won’t make you able to hear again, it’ll help you hear more than without, but it’s still a hearing aid” is hard but it’s not fair to bullshit people. What they had, that apparently effortless hearing, it’s gone and they should have support to come to terms with that.

For me learning to sign (bad level 2) really helped reduce my anxiety about managing without hearing because I’m not good enough at lipreading to follow much without my aids. Learning sign improved my lipreading and body language parsing skills and gave me other ways to think and communicate. An early boyfriend learned fingerspelling which worked and my current partner signs well enough to communicate some basics or supplement things like complex engineering because sign works amazingly well for that and helps my appalling auditory memory for complicated things.

I want to see less either/or attitudes to different communications methods and tools and choices and more “here is a toolbox of different things, try some out, have access to more if you want” at affordable prices and flexibility because at the moment lipreading classes often only run during the day; sign classes are expensive and hardly anyone knows anything about stuff like cueing which sounds like a thoroughly interesting thing to check out. Why can’t we ALL have access to free or low cost classes and information about these as well as better access to what we need like quiet rooms, lipspeakers/STTRs or BSL terps in appointments. Until we all have free choice and proper access none of us know what will work best for each of us. (oops I’ve gone a bit off topic, but arguably deafened people should get just as much access to all of the tools in the toolbox as appropriate)

I’ve a foot in both camps. I’ve very recently got very expensive private aids, and I do feel that I’ve been missing out, it would have been nice to hear like everyone else when I was growing up. But on the other hand being born hard of hearing has been hugely influential in my life. I’ve worked for a deafblind charity and now as a teacher I can empathise with the disabilities and difficulties of the children I teach. I also love taking my aids out for a quiet nights sleep. The only thing that I find really disappointing is that the hearing aid world seems to be made for older people. When I had NHS aids, the silly opening times, early finishes and lunch time closures annoyed me. I was as if they just expected everyone to be ealderly and to be able to come easily in the day. I wanted to go to a session about living with aids, but it was at 2pm on a Tuesday. Even in the private market, all the posters have older people on them, it feels like a shameful thing for younger people to have, an old persons disability. I think websitesike this have made a huge difference so keep up the good work.