English for the Hearing Impaired

The 2021 series of Strictly Come Dancing has been an interesting one. It was won by Rose Ayling-Ellis.

She is a deaf actress. During the program they showed parts of the dance without sound to show what it was like from her perspective. She was a very popular contestant and the program provoked online discussion about deafness that was generally positive and sympathetic.

Like many forms of impairment hearing loss comes in a range from being profoundly deaf from birth, profoundly deaf after experiencing hearing, to milder forms of hearing loss.

I only experience a mild form of hearing loss so I have never used the term disability for being a hearing aid wearer. I see it the same as someone who wears glasses compared to someone who is blind. One is real disability, the other is an impairment that is easily corrected, I think virtually no one would expect to call wearing glasses a disability.

But a hearing impairment differs from sight impairments. The wearing of glasses is something that pretty much all people do. In the summer virtually everyone is happy to wear sun glasses. This is cool, and its something that advertised by models, sports stars and famous actors. Even glasses that you need for near or far distance are worn by people trying to look cool or sophisticated. Glasses are worn by people who want to look intelligent or clever.

I have yet to see someone wearing hearing aids with a view to trying to make them sexy and sophisticated. If fact, unlike blindness, profoundly deaf people actually come across as mentally impaired in that their speech is affected and you are unable to communicate with them if you cannot do sign language or they're not looking at you.

Ultimately, wearing hearing aids is an embarrassment, one which I would rather not have to do, and one which when its focused on, I feel embarrassed about.

The other thing about hearing impairment is that its something that triggers impatience and anger in people in a way in which sight impairment doesn't. For example, if I passed someone something to read and they put it down, got their glasses out, picked it up again and read the paper, I wouldn't snatch it off them and shout 'oh for gods sake, why haven't you got your glasses on'. Whereas, if a person says something which you then ask them to repeat, this can trigger impatience, and elicit a reaction of impatient anger from the person who may shout 'of for gods sake, are you even wearing your hearing aids', or if they don't know of your impairment, 'are you deaf or something?'. Sometimes this happens even if they do know you have a hearing impairment.

Hearing is an annoying impairment. Its annoying for me but I appreciate that its very annoying for others too. My kids have to constantly repeat things, they have to wait until they are face to face with me before talking to me, they have the embarrassment of their friends coming round and knowing that I will mis-hear them, they have to live with a TV volume that could shatter glass. It is a challenge for others, I accept that. For me its a challenge too, and I am acutely aware of peoples impatience, anger or frustration and wish I could do something to stop this.

The other thing with hearing is that it’s an invisible impairment. Blind people are noticeable. Whether it’s a white stick at the far end of that spectrum, to thick glasses to just glasses. Even when it’s corrected by contact lenses, it’s invisible.

However, with hearing, you can’t see that someone wears hearing aids or hasn’t heard. But unlike sight it is an issue to others, it’s an issue if you beep your car for someone to move out of your way and they don’t notice. Or if you ring your bike bell and they don’t move. Or if you ask someone their address from behind a mask and plastic screen, perhaps while looking at your computer and you have to repeat yourself until the frustration levels reach anger and incredulity point. At this point the person with hearing impairment is humiliated and apologetic, while the other person is exasperated, sceptical about your hearing loss and more inclined to believe you're either just rude or an idiot.

I don't know what has caused my hearing loss. A hearing specialist once said that it was probably hereditary. Its the small hairs within my ear that create sound when fluid washes over them. They have shrunk back slightly giving me a weakness in hearing at a certain range, that range being where sounds like 'th' or 'es' or many ends of words in English are formed. This doesn't mean I can't hear the words, but the exact shape of the word isn't as crystal clear to me as it should be which means I am slower to catch the word and understand it. It means that I have to focus more on what it being said and take into account as many other clues as I can, such as context of the conversation or the other persons face. Many other factors also improve what I pick up such as minimising background noise and minimising the number of people I speak to at one time.

As to whether the hearing loss is hereditary, that seems possible. Although my parents do wear hearing aids they didn't get them until they were in their 60's , after I got mine. My mum was a primary school teacher and I wondered whether it never really mattered if she didn't hear kids in an environment of noise. Kids would never really notice if you didn't hear bits of what they said. She probably had to put effort into ignoring them more than listening to them. Dad, I'm not sure, although he went through his working life without hearing aids.

I only ever knew my grandfathers, not my grandmothers. One didn't say too much and we never really spoke bar short sentences, his hearing wasn't noticeably difficult from what I experienced, although I only ever spoke to him 1 on 1 in a room with no other noise. My other granddad did wear hearing aids and his hearing was awful. However he spent his life working in saw mills and workshops so we wrote it off as working in a loud industrial environment without ear defenders.

From about 13 I had paper rounds. The Sony Walkman had been invented a few years earlier and for Christmas one year my parents bought me an excellent one. It could record on cassettes as well as play cassettes so I could record from the radio or buy albums. I wore this constantly when doing paper rounds. People used to say at the time that listening with it too loud would harm your hearing but there is very little medical research into this (the last thing Sony or Apple would fund) so its not something Doctors can point to as a cause of damage to hearing. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn't.

I worked in a supermarket at school and I don't think I suffered any issue with my hearing. From 20 I worked in an office. I still can't recall noticing any problems. But I do know that between 25 and 30 a few things changed. I worked open plan offices, usually arranged into pods and I was always able to keep working when other people were chatting. I guess I gained a reputation for being a bit detached because of this.

I can remember a colleague scoffing at me in the afternoon of 9/11 for being surprised that planes had flown into buildings when they had been talking about it and watching it online all morning, without me paying any attention and not picking up on what they’d been saying.

It just matched my detached persona. I don't think I pursued this persona deliberately, but it paid off for me so it wasn't anything that I needed to change. I can remember a couple of occasions walking up staircases following a client who was still talking and I was answering questions that they had not asked having misheard them. This was mildly embarrassing but nothing which could not be laughed off and moved on from. But I did reach a point where sometimes in one to one meetings I was missing things if the person was not face to face. I didn't massively enjoy talking on the phone, it always felt more difficult but I blamed it on phone signal or something else. And conversations in a car is impossible and the background noise significant, that was a challenge.

I decided to get my hearing tested with an audiologist. She showed me a graph where the line dropped off at the end rather than staying flat. Staying flat is the hearing equivalent of 20/20 vision. She referred me for NHS hearing tests which merely confirmed the same and offered me a huge NHS hearing aid. It was horrifying.

The audiologist was very kind. She pointed to the fact that the the iPod, recently invented, meant that everyone was now going round with something in their ears. This made no difference to me at all. I wasn't even 30. The thought of wearing hearing aids was horrifying. I refused. In fear however, I did have laser treatment on my eyes so that I no longer needed glasses. I thoughts to myself that if I was having something hanging off my face I had to limit it to just the one thing otherwise I'd look like I was covered in scaffolding.

But I think over the next 10 years from 25 to 35 my hearing affected my work even more. I became more isolated from people I worked with. I created a stronger persona around this, and tried to make this work for me. But ultimately, in an office and in professional services environments like Ernst & Young and Deloitte, your teams, allegiances and networks mattered. My networks consisted of people who knew I was an effective blunt instrument who could be relied upon to shake teams and people up, and upset things when they needed to be upset. Perhaps I should have been a bit more long sighted when they came in after I had done my thing to take over a restored and more effective team. Their good cop to my bad. I enjoyed it at the time but it wasn't something that would lead to along term career for me.

I was head hunted from Ernst & Young by Deloitte specifically because I had a reputation of being able to shake things up and change things. The job was also Bristol based and I was desperate to get away from London and the Thames Valley where my work with Ernst & Young had taken me so I could be closer to the kids. For a short time I did this at Deloitte but unfortunately the person I disagreed with most was the Partner in charge. In the end I left Deloitte. We mutually parted company and I'm sure there were various factors involved. But I think one factor was the fact that my hearing was limited and that limitation was leading to poor personal relationships on a group level.

I left Deloitte in 2006, aged 34. I returned to the audiologist a year later and got small private digital hearing aids.

Glasses have limitations. For example they fog up with condensation, or if you look in the peripheral vision around the fames, you cannot see. Hearing aids are highly complicated pieces of micro electronics. However, all they do it take sound and blast it into your ear. Whilst some can be tweaked so that it tries to blast the sound at the frequencies you need, they still have their limitations and are a blunt instrument. Audiologists are fairly honest and they don’t say it’s about restoring you to perfect hearing (unlike with glasses where, looking through the lens means your sight is perfect), merely trying to minimise the weak spots.

Vision is not done with your eyes and hearing is not done with your ears. It all takes place in your brain. It is known that your brain only has the processing power to see a small range of things, people have likened it to shining a torch into the dark. You can only see whats in the beam of light. The rest, everything thats darkness, is not seen, but created by your brain based on its assumption of what should be there.

Its the same with your hearing. Your brain knows that you want to hear words and speech from humans. Hearing aids don't. My first month of wearing them consisted of regular head aches, shock at the noise of birds in the morning, surprise a how often church bells rang, but the worst thing was the constant noise and irritation coming from fans that cooled the hard drive of computers that I sat next to all day while working. It was virtually impossible to work with that noise which was the main sound picked up by the hearing aids and shoved into my ears.

I was told to persist and wear them even in situations where I was sat in silence. This was good advice and over time your brain does its best at filtering out the white noise of every day life from the extra volume being shoved in. Things do improve although I think I’ve reached the point where the sound of white goods remains noticeable, while bird song and church bells don't really exist in my world.

15 years on and I can confirm that I still hate wearing them. I hate that I have to have them, I feel far too young for them and if I could change anything about myself it would be to fix my ears (bar this I’m damn near perfect).

But despite this, I think there are some things that hearing loss has done for me. I think I listen carefully when people are speaking, much more so than I think I normally would. I have to be aware of everything I may miss and I try to make sure that I am able to minimise inconvenience for others. I think more carefully about what people say. I am sympathetic to people who are frustrated when talking to me.

Client meetings remain challenging. The batteries run out every 5 days giving a beep warning 20 minutes before. This always seems to be in a client meeting. I will now always change my batteries the day I fly to Cyprus to try and avoid them running out when I am out there. I have to check meeting rooms before I go in and try and sit so that clients are talking at me.

But I still have difficulties hearing people. Accents are a challenge. Not all, and not always foreign, some foreign accents are easier when their word endings are strong and they naturally speak loud (Spanish, Greek and Northern Irish fall into this category), some English accents are a challenge when they blend word endings into the next word, Geordie, Glaswegian for example.

And then we move into a world where we have to use less than perfect internet connections and less than perfect laggy technology, with low quality microphones, speakers and headphones and to make matters even worse, masks. Masks which hook over your hearing aid and become entangled so when you try and remove your mask because your glasses have steamed up and you can’t see, you tear out an expensive hearing aid at the same time. Annoying, embarrassing, frustrating.

Lockdown also closed the hearing aid stores so spares weren’t available which meant that the rubber tips of my hearing aids became worn. This led to 3 visits to A&E for it to be removed from my ear canal as it detached from the hearing aid. I was seen by very happy and friendly nurses who were literally bored stiff because no one was coming into A&E due to Covid. All 3 times I was seen within 20 minutes, something unheard of in normal times. The final time the nurse said about the implements in the photo below.

“These have to be thrown away now because I have used them on you, but if when I put them down, you picked them up, I doubt I would notice.”

They now live in the bathroom cabinet.

Although it’s not just the world which makes things difficult. I make things difficult for myself too. I enjoy swimming. A hobby where you can’t wear hearing aids. Also an activity where talking and hearing are not compatible. But when preparing to swim I will put in ear plugs (hearing air wearing has made me obsessively sensitive about things in my ear, including water) and I put on a swimming cap. People at the pool will still talk to me. Maybe for people with perfect hearing this is fine, for me, this is total silence.

I also enjoy hot yoga. A class where you need to listen to the teacher, sometimes when you’re not actually able to see them. And also a class where you get drenched with sweat. This means that at some point in the class sweat will go down your head and into the hearing aid stopping it from working. This will make the final part of the class more of a challenge and one where I have to base what I do on others around me. This is the same as wearing hearing aids in the rain, which is why hoodies, hats and coats with hoods are now all considered when I go out.

Out of work my biggest challenges and biggest source of hurt is in my personal relationships and especially my children. I make conversation difficult or frustrating for other people so that they become frustrated with me and reduce talking to me. But I am also lucky in that my children's generation are such addicts of video content that they watch everything with subtitles. This has really helped normalise my subtitle habit.

It surprises me how some situations are made specifically challenging. I have been with audiologists when they leave the room and talk to you. Doctors receptionists hide behind high counters looking down. Glass erected to keep out viruses which also block sound. I have been walking along and cyclists have approached from behind really fast and rang a bell, a bell which I have not heard.

So I guess there are some things people can do to be sensitive towards hearing impairment...

- Generally, when out, be aware of invisible disabilities. - Before talking, think about your distance to the person you’re talking to. You don’t have to start the conversation in the other room, or when they’ve moved to the other room. Wait, engage them, then talk. - Be sensitive in cars when talking to someone with poor hearing. Their natural habit will be to want to look at you talk. Best not encourage this. - Start a conversation slowly, or with another signal, for example “hey” or patting someone and saying “you know x/y/z” so that the person knows the subject you’re on. - Don’t mumble or cover your mouth or look at your feet when talking. - Embrace subtitles.

- Be patient when repeating yourself and welcome the opportunity to clarify and repeat things.

Despite the awareness and sympathy that Strictly has brought, the invisible nature of hearing loss will remain a challenge, but at least people like me feel less embarrassed and more willing and able to talk openly about the challenges. And despite my moans above about my condition, I know that I’m actually very lucky to be as healthy as I am and that my challenges are nothing in comparison to others. In some ways, I’m grateful for what this partial deafness brings to me. It is what makes me me (challenging but lovely).