2003-01-17 - 1:08 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Presque Rien", Francis Cabrel

The previous journal entry garnered a few questions about my situation with my hearing (or lack thereof). I thought I had written a "hearing" entry by now, but apparently I haven't. I have snippets here and there.

Which is as it should be, I suppose, since my hearing as always been mostly incidental. If someone were to ask me to describe myself to them, "deaf" wouldn't even make the list. Odd, since the first thing I ever say upon meeting a new person (which means every single time I go out), I have to say, "I have trouble hearing and need to read lips." It's as automatic as "hello" at this point.

Nevertheless, since people seem to be interested, and I'm happy to talk about it (especially from a linguistic and sociolinguistic perspective) I thought it would be nice to pull together all the snippets into one entry. Sorry for the lack of segues, but I'm happy to answer questions if anybody has any more.

This is a pretty good description of the basics:

There are literally dozens of familiar songs I hear on the radio and have no idea what their titles are. The reason is that I can hear the music and hear the DJ, but I can't understand the lyrics or what the DJ is rambling about.

This is something that mystifies a lot of people, so let me explain.

Y'know how there are pitches of sound. High pitched and low pitched. My hearing loss in the low pitches is not quite as severe. This means that I can hear things like thunder, construction trucks, etc. without hearing aids on, although not quite as loudly as most people.

As the pitches rise -- to the level of human voices -- my hearing gets worse. But hearing aids amplify the pitches I can hear, so that people's voices are recognizable to me. The sounds that people make using their voices -- primarily vowels -- I can hear with hearing aids. I can recognize whether it's a man or a woman, and through personalized things like rhythm of speech and inflection, recognize who it is that's speaking, without looking at them.

But here's the rub: My hearing for the pitches which define consonants -- those little quiet breathy noises people make with their lips, teeth, and tongue that distinguish between B and P, or T and K -- is totally shot. I can't differentiate, without lipreading, the difference between "tack" and "pack", for instance. So I'm walking around hearing a lot of vowels and very few consonants, my own personal hangman/Wheel of Fortune game, except I have to buy consonants, not vowels. The context of the conversation has a function similar to the "hint" you get on the show.

So you see, this is enough for me to hear music (with the exception of high pitched stuff like flutes, upper violin notes, and high-pitched percussion). And I can hear the DJ, but can't understand a word he says.

Lipreading fills in the blanks to an extent. "B" doesn't look a damn thing like "L" or "K". On the other hand it DOES look a lot like "P" and "M", so there's a lot of mental shuffling going on, trying on different possibilities to see what fits in the context of the conversation. Lipreaders depend very, very heavily on context. I might not be able to comprehend a sentence someone says out of the blue, but if we're already talking about a specific subject, it helps a lot with the guesswork.

One of the oddest things I've caught myself doing is the mental work that goes into deciphering something said from across the room without me seeing the speaker. I have a jumble of meaningless vowel sounds in my head, and I hold onto them -- including tone and inflection -- and my mind starts racing through the possible things the person could be talking about given the topic of conversation at the time. About 5-10 seconds later, when I hit on the right guess, suddenly all the pieces fall into place and I realize exactly what they said, word for word, by fitting the topic to the jumble of sounds I was holding on to.

It's really, really freaky. Even more freaky is how speedy and subconscious the process is. It's very similar to how sometimes I'll fall asleep working on a mental problem of some sort, and when I wake up in the morning I know the solution. It's like my brain is working overtime without any help from my consciousness.

I think I am also extremely lucky in that I have something of a knack for languages. My brain seems to be pretty open to the idiosyncrasies of other languages and doesn't try to map them directly to English. This same openness probably helps with all the context-driven guesswork of lipreading. I think sometimes other people with similar hearing losses have more difficulty deciphering spoken English, in which case I can understand why they might want to isolate themselves in an ASL community.

Anyway. Lipreading for a long period of time is exhausting. One thing I particularly envy of hearing folks is the ability to understand speech with no effort. I would love to be able to do one thing with my hands and eyes while using my ears for listening -- I bet I would be a talk-radio FREAK if I could hear. But oh well.

From an e-mail to New_Iconoclast:

> What do you
MISS about hearing? Music? Your mom's voice?
> Birdsongs, crickets, running water?

With hearing aids, I can hear parts of all those things. Because I still have some of the lower pitches, I can hear the bass line, drums, and voice in music (but not flutes, violins, guitar solos), so it's enough to truly enjoy music but I'm still missing stuff. I can usually tell when people are off-key. I can hear people's voices enough to recognize them, and I can hear tone and humor or anger in someone's voice. I can hear birds, although it's just noise, not a "song". My abilities with music are diminishing as my hearing deteriorates, which is disappointing. In high school I played piano to accompany the singing groups, and I was very good at it, but I don't know if I could do it now. Maybe with the digital aids. :)

I don't remember what it was like to really hear, so it's not so much that I miss things as I wish I could do them. I'd like to be able to: fully participate in group conversations, listen to talk radio, hear all of music instead of just part, understand song lyrics, watch movies that aren't captioned, and eavesdrop. I would like to be able to wash dishes at Thanksgiving with my back to my family and still be able to listen to the conversation. I think it was the man who wrote "What's That Pig Outdoors?" who said, "It is not hearing one misses, but overhearing."

I do my best to make up for all of this. When people visit me, I make them sit around our oval table with me at the head or foot so I can see them all. In restaurants, if I'm with two other people, I make them sit next to each other and I sit across from them so I can see them at the same time, to avoid the tennis-match syndrome (when the two people visiting are guys, they don't like this ;). I will interrupt a group conversation and make people repeat what they said if I missed it. I am very demanding. :)

The comical side of lipreading:

Poindexter just walked into the room and said,

"Bridget Hummus"

I asked him to repeat. Lipreading sideways is not optimal.

"Bridget Hummus," it still looked like.

So I told him what I thought he said, and he choked on his soda and had to pull himself together before he could tell me what he really said.

"Mission accomplished"

(He was referring to the little home project he had set for himself this evening.)

----

Telemarketers occasionally call the house, asking for me by name. The vast majority of them seem to have gotten my number through the Visa card I have, which means I should probably get a new one, but it doesn't annoy me quite enough yet.

Anyway, Poindexter usually tells people, "She can't hear", which they seem to often take as "She's not here". (Who is it that has trouble hearing, again?)

Last night, the following exchange took place:

Telemarketer: Hello, may I speak to Evelynne Poindexter?

Poindexter: She's deaf, she can't hear, therefore she cannot talk on the phone.

Telemarketer: Oh, I'm sorry.

Poindexter: [Brightly] No, it's quite all right, she's been living with it for a long time and she handles it well.

Telemarketer: Um, okay, bye-bye.

When he relayed the conversation to me, the "living with it/handles it well" comment made me laugh hysterically. "Handles it well" is a gross understatement. I make the adjustments I need to make and get on with life.

I can't figure out why they say "I'm sorry", unless it's an automatic reaction to feeling awkward. Unless, of course, they think being hard-of-hearing is a horrible affliction. (Technically I think I'm probably deaf, but hearing aids and a love of language help a lot.) I don't think it is, but since I depend on my sight so much I'm pretty horrified by the idea of going blind, so there's that.

Other random lipreading stuff:

I remembered that in the video for "Electric Avenue", when [Eddy Grant] sings "down" in "We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue", it looks to me (a hard-of-hearing lipreader) like "doan". So I speculated to Poindexter that he must not be a native-born American; perhaps Jamaican. (I don't know a damn thing about Eddy Grant and I was only 12 or so when his video came out so bear with me if this information is glaringly obvious to you.) From the stuff I see on the web he appears to be from the Caribbean somewhere, so I wasn't too far off.

Everyone's always so surprised that lipreaders can "see" accents. Try it in the mirror sometime -- see how different it looks when you say "I pahked the cah in Hahvahd yahd" than if you put the R's in there?

[I've read elsewhere that the differences in speaking that we call an "accent" are almost entirely caused by changes in vowel pronunciation. Given that I can hear vowels, I have no trouble identifying accents in general with my residual hearing. But I can "see" them too.]

----

I don't have trouble understanding people who speak quickly, as long as they enunciate. They wear me out sooner, though, because it requires slightly more concentration to understand them. A normal pace of speaking allows me plenty of time to process all the cues -- lipreading, context, the vowels I can hear -- and allows them to click into place very shortly after the person says stuff. There's probably a 1-2 second lag between what I take in and the moment of full comprehension. When people speak really quickly, though, I start lagging behind and have to juggle more information at a time.

On dealing with deafness day in and day out:

In Jaffo's Galveston journal (link is dead), he wrote:

I hate traveling, of course. In my daily life, I can structure things to minimize problems and keep myself comfortable, but strange places really make me feel handicapped. Adjusting to furniture that's too high or too low, climbing in and out of difficult vehicles, and navigating bumpy terrain. I have to move slower and work harder just to achieve a level of functioning I consider normal, and that's a lot of stress.

It's not the struggle itself that bothers me, it's the social cost of making my handicap the center of attention. I'm very self-conscious about it, and trips like this really hurt my pride.

From what I've heard, feeling self-conscious about a disability is fairly common. My grandmother, for instance, was embarrassed by her hearing loss and would pretend she heard things when she didn't rather than explain. When her knees got so bad she couldn't walk very far, she chose not to go out anymore rather than use a wheelchair.

I am occasionally guilty of pretending I understood something when I didn't. This is usually in a situation when someone starts talking to me in the grocery line and doesn't seem all that interested in feedback. If they ask a question I'm forced to ask them to repeat, but if they're just blabbing and I'm going to be gone in 60 seconds, I don't bother getting into it. I smile and nod.

This is laziness, though. Not self-consciousness. I can't remember the last time I was actually self-conscious about it.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped giving a shit. I think this is quite possibly due to the fact that in EVERY SINGLE INTERACTION I have with another human being, I have to deal with it. I have to make sure people are facing me. "I'm sorry, I can't hear very well and need to lipread" is something I say at least once a day if I leave the house. I have to ask them to repeat. I have to ask them to speak loudly or enunciate more (often a nearly futile request -- people who mumble seem incapable of enunciating). Every time I meet someone new I have to expain, "I can't hear very well. I need to lipread." People talk to me on the street and I say "Hold on, I can't hear you from here," as I walk over to them.

In situations with people who know me (friends, neighbors, family, coworkers), I get bossy. I insist on quiet corners in restaurants. I dictate who sits where and make people move into a close circle around me when they're scattered across the room. I badger people who mumble -- "I'm sorry, could you say that again?" -- or, if they absolutely just can't enunciate, ask someone else to "translate". It never stops.

The alternative, you see, would be not to communicate. That's hardly acceptable. :)

Y'know what I wonder though, is if I'm a pain in the ass. If people get tired of having to repeat shit. There are some people whom I know I drive crazy: People who say things off to the side, not directed at any single person, and often sarcastic. I NEVER understand what these people say (because they are not speaking clearly and directly to me) and they HATE having to repeat their sarcastic remarks. But I wonder about everyone else. Given that people still want to spend time with me, I guess they don't think it's too much bother. Plus if they "obey the rules" -- face me, stay close, enunciate -- they find they rarely need to repeat themselves anyway.

----

Y'know, I've always been mystified by the idea of choosing your primary "identity" based on something like race, sexual orientation, or deafness. I'm not talking about being unashamed of those qualities -- I should HOPE you'd be unashamed -- but to use them as the primary means by which you DEFINE yourself? I don't get it.

There's no way in hell I could choose one thing as my "identity" and it certainly wouldn't be a random genetic accident. My being hard-of-hearing (HOH) is an incidental. It has had a part in shaping who I am, but then, so has being female, white, and middle-class American, and I don't see any of those things as being my primary identity.

My primary identity is just ME. I'm Evelynne. I define myself by the things that I think, feel, and do. To choose one of them over all the others wouldn't tell you a damn thing about me. And which do you think tells you more about who I am: the fact that I'm HOH, or how I deal with being HOH?

My "deaf accent":

... I asked if Giant was always this crowded at 4pm, and she said it was always crowded, period. We exchanged some small talk and then she said, "You're hearing impaired," more like a statement than a question.

This happens to me all the time. I've got an accent of sorts that no one's been able to explain to me very well. Marlee Matlin's got it, and I can hear it, but I don't have the faintest idea how to get rid of it in my own voice. I'll have to ask a speech pathologist. There's something hollow about my voice, or nasal.

[Poindexter tells me that the "hollow" quality is MUCH less pronounced in my voice than it is in Marlee's. Very faint, actually.]

Turns out her son is also hearing impaired, which is why she recognized the quality in my voice. We chatted about that. Her son was 2 when he lost his hearing, and although he can speak and lipread and is oral at work, socially he is Deaf. Pretty nifty. I was five before I lost any hearing, making lipreading a breeze, so I never had much of a reason to learn it myself.

Christ, this is getting long. There's still more snippets. If it's that interesting, let me know and I'll post more.

Gratuitous photo of the day:

This is me on my father's arm, walking down the "aisle" on my wedding day, about 4 years ago. (There was actually not an aisle; he walked me across the room to where everyone was gathered in a semicircle.) Look how I look like I'm having so much fun!

Wait 'til you see the picture my SIL took, wherein you can see how miserable and "get me out of here" I was really feeling. Marriage, I love; being the star of the show in my own wedding, I hated. Look for the truth-revealing picture in the next journal entry.

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