Juliet England: My deafie diary – part 1

I thought I’d try out a new format for Limping Chicken this month – a sort of deafie diary, if you will, an overview of all those day-to-day niggles us cloth-ears face which don’t merit articles in their own right.

Love it or hate it, let me know what you think.

Saturday 20 July

At my local train station to catch a train I absolutely have to be on to avoid the whole day going merrily to pot, I face the confusion of a changed platform with no new departure point displayed on the screens. Hear the announcements? Don’t make me laugh.

Waves of panic wash over me. In the end, I force a guard (sorry, Customer Services Assistant) to write down what I have to do, as the seconds slip away. I follow the instructions, and wait on the footbridge for the elusive new platform number to be revealed.

I ask a woman standing next to me to relay any announcements, explaining that I can’t hear them. I’d seen her a couple of minutes earlier, and knew she was aiming for the same train. She nods, but as soon as the platform is announced on the tannoy, she scuttles off with her pushchair.

Eventually, it flashes up and I just about make my train.

Saturday 27 July 2019

To Oxford to see Twelfth Night in the quad outside the Old Bodleian. It’s a brilliant production, we have good seats and I can follow it by discreetly reading the text until the light fades. Luckily I’ve seen it before and know the play a little.

All goes swimmingly – until a party starts up on the other side of one of the quad walls. A very noisy party, loud enough to distract and annoy the hearing, never mind the deaf. The last couple of acts go almost entirely unheard, as I try not to think about how much the ticket cost, or what that money could have bought instead.

Thursday 8 August 2019

In London for a market research focus group about an app for people with various disabilities I’ve been helping to test.

On the train up, I struggle to hear a fellow passenger when I ask him where the buffet car is. (I’m feeling reckless with a fiver’s worth of Great Western Railway vouchers.) Another passenger, sitting next to me, writes There is no buffet car on these trains anymore on his laptop for me.

The app helps travellers to navigate their way around an airport terminal. Frankly if I’m just lost, I’ll ask someone and force them to make themselves understood, and I hate maps and apps, but there you go.

The room is too small, hot and stuffy for the 10 or so of us, but, in a rare treat, the words are conveyed as live captions on a screen. Hilarious subtitle fail of the afternoon comes when some nonsense flashes up about Theresa May Airways. The idea of the ex-PM diversifying into civil aviation sends coffee dribbling from my nostrils. Then again, perhaps she needs another income stream now she’s a plain old backbencher.

Friday 9 August 2019

I’m meeting an acquaintance for coffee. It was one of those things said after a party. We must have coffee. I never expected her to take me up on it, and we’ve never met socially on our own before. We’ll call her E.

E is truly lovely, making what happens next infinitely worse. Her gentle, lilting Scottish tones, combined with the hiss and belch of the coffee machine in my town’s favourite (and indeed only) exclusively gluten-free gaff makes hearing her all but impossible. I resort to alternating between nodding, smiling and looking earnest.

Thank god I catch what she’s saying when she mentions A Sad And Serious Family Matter so I don’t stuff up by going ‘Aw, that’s really nice.’ And I know our views on Brexit are shared, so when I hear ‘backstop’ I know to shake my head in dismay and murmur, ‘I know, it’s awful.’

Still, it’s exhausting. I then meet my friend K for an early lunch, the coffee meet-up stretching delightfully into lunchtime. (I’m freelance. It’s a Friday. Your point?)  Anyway, K’s more familiar voice is clear as a bell, the contrast marked, and she and I enjoy one of the best gossipy, bitchy and cackling lunches we’ve had in ages.

Thursday 15 August 2019

It is my mother’s birthday. Much as I want to phone, and hear her voice, I know this would be a tortuously pointless exercise. I send a text instead. She doesn’t reply.

Wednesday 21 August

I sit in the windowless, airless room of my local audiology department, and hand my hearing aids over to the quietly efficient audiologist, explaining I’ve found it more than usually hard to hear of late.

“Er,” she says, turning them over in her hands. “Do you realise you’ve put the right tubing back into the left mould?” No, I should have quipped, but I know I’ve put the left tube back into the right mould. (Somehow I have managed to do both. Excellent.)

Anyway, she adjusts the volume and it’s too loud, making my eardrums hurt and my ears pound until she resets it again. We agree that the limit is being reached of what my local audiology team can realistically do for me.

I do the initial screening test for a cochlear implant there and then. In another room, I sit in front of a speaker through which various random words are played. I catch some of the sounds, but hear a grand total of one word correctly.

“Will I make an appointment for you in Oxford for more cochlear implant testing?” asks the audiologist.

Now there’s a question.

Photo credit: Richard Brown, Progress Theatre