Juliet England: Deaf in a crisis: coping in an emergency situation (BSL)

It’s been a perfectly ordinary Sunday afternoon. I’ve been to visit my remaining Aged Parent and can’t be bothered to walk the last bit home from the station. (In my defence, it is uphill.) 

And I know a bus is coming (allegedly). So I’m sitting at the stop, minding my own business, flicking on my phone, glancing up periodically to look for the bus. Nothing to see here. Just another mildly dull weekend teatime. 

My trusty ride (the X40) trundles into view. Marvellous. Now I just have to reach for my little rucksack containing my wallet containing my disabled bus pass (thanks local council, thanks hearing loss) and I’ll be on my way to complete the usual tedious domestic Sunday night tasks. 

But – what’s this? There’s an empty space where my bag was, just a few seconds ago. The panic rises in my throat. A man is walking away; surely you’d run rather than stroll if you were legging it from the scene of a crime? 

Did the guy manage to steal my back because I didn’t hear him? 

“Oi!” I yell out. “Oi!” But he just keeps on walking. 

The bus stops. The doors swing open. I am jabbering, muttering the odd swear word. The driver recognises me and says I can ride for free. I utter a few more obscenities (sorry) and decide to get off, clutching just a carrier bag with a few edible donations from the Aged Parent, AKA the food bank and, mercifully, my phone. 

In my head, I list the things in my nicked bag. Purse. Keys. An expensive library book. And, perhaps most importantly of all, my spare batteries and charging paraphernalia for my cochlear implant. 

I look around frantically, peering into bins in desperation. A car pulls up. My hearing seems to have almost completely gone with the stress, but I manage to gather that the driver, a youngish woman, can see my distress and wants to take me home. Cynically, I hesitate. What if she is in on the scam, pretending to be a kindly passer-by but really ready to mug me off in some other way? 

I decide to take my chances. She drives me the short distance home. 

“You’re safe,” she says. “You can replace everything, and you haven’t been hurt.” 

Hmm. I wonder how long my implant battery will last. Do I have any spares at home? Even if I do, do I have the kit to charge them up? 

We park up outside my block. Nice Lady, it turns out, is called Emma. She hits the phones for me, calling the cops, my bank and, in an inspired move, my home insurance company – she reckons they’ll send out a locksmith. 

Calling all three organisations involves countless tortuous automated systems whose options leave you swirling around in a black hole, which would have been all but impossible to navigate for a deafie, even without the still-raging stress. 

And even with Emma’s better hearing, it takes nearly an hour to stop bank cards, get a crime number and establish that a locksmith will be coming out – from Dunstable of all places. 

I manage to text my upstairs neighbours, Chris and Yuko, who, praise the Lord, are in and happy to let me hole up at theirs until Dave the locksmith rocks up. 

Emma refuses to leave until she knows I can get inside. (Frankly, it’s borderline harassment.) 

Chris and Yuko are kindness itself, keeping me warm and caffeinated for the next hour or two. But, clearly, I wouldn’t normally be spending so much of my (or their) Sunday evening in their flat and polite chat is tiring for us cloth ears at the best of times. (I must stress that this is not a complaint.) 

The phone goes and Chris interprets for me. Dave the locksmith is here. Dave is a hero, a proper geezer. Other neighbours, Cat and Fiona, make us tea while he works – Dave spits out their oat milk in disgust, demanding a ‘proper’ brew. 

But he turns out to be very understanding of my hearing loss, and we’re in the flat in no time. 

“You’re very quick,” I say. 

“So the missus is always complaining,” winks Dave. 

To my intense relief, I find a spare charger and cable at home, so I can at fire up my one remaining implant battery. 

Next morning, I have breakfast with a friend, who has to pay given my lack of access to funds. She does so without blinking. 

I’ve put out a plea on a local Facebook group. Another friend alerts me to a post from the local pub – they’ve posted a photo of my rucksack, which had been unceremoniously dumped in its car park the previous evening, asking if it’s mine. In minutes, I am enjoying an emotional reunion with my cochlear implant stuff and everything else minus, inevitably, my wallet. 

Another neighbour, Laura Next Door, helps with yet another call to the bank and gets me some cash and a small plant to cheer me up. We establish that the thief has spent around £70 on my credit card, but that that this will be refunded; a tricky call even with less than perfect hearing. 

And then, then, comes another Facebook message from a stranger saying she has found my purse – cue another emotional reunion with bus pass, disabled railcard and everything else that I would have otherwise had to replace. The wallet had been dumped around a mile away. 

So once the new bank cards arrived, there were no lingering effects from the bag snatch. I did cancel my CI check-up as it was two days later, and at the time I wasn’t sure I’d have money or railcard to get to Oxford for the appointment. 

The whole experience was a lesson in how kind people can be when you most need their support. It was also a masterclass in crisis management. 

Finally, it was a stark reminder of how tough it can be when you can’t really use a phone, but urgently need to make complicated calls in an emergency. Without the help of Emma the driver-by, this would have been a very different story. It was also a reminder to me, as a CI user, of just how dependent I have become on its technology.