Deaf, deaf, hard of hearing?? I can never tell!, I can hear certain things perfectly without effort, like my family, I have no problem hearing them, I can hear certain music, but i missout on parts like certain frequencies my ears just dont pick up, I can sometimes hear Car horns, and doggies barking and babies crying, and other days I cant hear these things at all!! In college id swear that fellow students and lecturers think im lying! when they talk to me, I answer them, and they forget that I have a problem, than the days I dont answer them they think im ignorant, *well thats how I feel! they probably dont think that at all!
but i dunno where I fit?!! I tell people I am severely deaf as that is the title i have been given by my audio, but somedays i think i hear better than the hearing folk! and I can get very confused! I know my ears are severely deaf, but my family dont think so as I have no problems with them ever! I dunno if its just because im used to them or what! then there are days Keith has to shout at me or tap my shoulder to get my attention! I dunno, I wish my ears could make up their mind or something!!!
Anyone else get this wierdness?? what do you say to people about your hearing difficulty? I let people know I am severely deaf and that I lip read a lot of the time, and then some days ill answer them when I wasnt looking at them to lip read and they look at me funny!! i feel like a lier but im not! I often wonder will I just sign all the time and use a note book to avoid confusion?!! Meh!
January 19th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
This is something I’ve had issues with for a long time. On one hand, I can hear a LOT of stuff. On the other hand, my hearing is useless for understanding speech.
I’m not “hard of hearing” when it comes to speech. I’m “impossible of hearing”. IMHO that makes me deaf.
But people have all these preconceptions about what “deaf” means. Like that I can’t hear ANYTHING. *gah*.
“Severely hard of hearing” might convey it a bit better for me. But I tend to just stick with “deaf” and work with it from there.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
As I am to understand things from most of the sources I’ve read about my own growing problem, missing certain frequencies does not constitude a label of “deaf”. I’m sure many people who were born completely deaf may envy what hearinf you have. Some may not. You can understand your family (humamn speech) quite well by your description and I even envy you for that. There’s not alot of definition (legal ones) on the books anywhere except self defined ones by associations for deaf persons. Most have come to an aggreable standard which seems quite simple and acceptable.
Any person with a speech comprehension score of less than 20% is considered to be legally deaf. This means that you only comprehend 25% of whats being said. This test is pretty simple and can be done with a simple appointment to your audiologist. So my friend you are not deaf——————–YET. Be thankful your not frustrating your family by saying “huh what? Making them face you during a conversation only to embarass your self by repeating the wrong text of what was said. WHat? Pop farted?
No you dip—————–would you like a “POP TART”?
Hope this helps.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Sara,
I know exactly where your comming from. For me its a seriously depressing situation to barely if at all understand human speech. I’m completely deaf in my left ear and my right ear I’ve only got 4% speech discrimination. I just got a free hearing aide, a powerful state of the art top of the line typpe thing courtesy of the good folks at the VA (the feds basically) and I’ve got to tell you it hasn’t helped much at all. The world is a noisy place indeed. Cars and trucks and planes etc etc. It all sounds like (if memory serves me) a football stadium full of people cheering. Now try and undertstand a few words of one of those people and its insane. I don’t know why I bothered trying.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
Sara,
I know exactly where your comming from. For me its a seriously depressing situation to barely if at all understand human speech. I’m completely deaf in my left ear and my right ear I’ve only got 4% speech discrimination. I just got a free hearing aide, a powerful state of the art top of the line typpe thing courtesy of the good folks at the VA (the feds basically) and I’ve got to tell you it hasn’t helped much at all. The world is a noisy place indeed. Cars and trucks and planes etc etc. It all sounds like (if memory serves me) a football stadium full of people cheering. Now try and undertstand a few words of one of those people and its insane. I don’t know why I bothered trying.
Your not hard of hearing. Your like me. Deaf as a post. People would most likely have a more intellegent conversation with a tree than talking with me.
Mr. Thwarp
January 20th, 2007 at 4:54 am
well ok, let me elaborate on what i mean by I can hear my family no problem… I do of course say ‘huh’, and what all the time, and I rely on lipreading so they have to face me, but i find with them its not as bad as with new people or strangers, with newbies I cant make out any thing untill I really get to know them!! so where does THAT leave me then??
January 20th, 2007 at 5:07 am
also my hearing aids leave me in a ‘football stadium’ as you describe it, , I am also completely deaf in my right ear, and have been for a very long time, also my left ear as my audio has told me, does all of the remaining listening, and I have about 15% hearing leaft in that, so thats it!! I dunno
im certainly not completely deaf no, but you can hardely call me hearing either because im simpley not! new people I just dont hear, I cant hear men at all, its the low tones i have problems with! so im lost as to where i stand 
January 20th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
i know what you mean by ‘football stadium’. my hearing aid never seems to be perfect. besides, how do people who actually make the hearing aids make them so that they are what people without hearing aids hear? and, ugh the problems with hearing aids. dont even get me started, heh. im comepletely deaf in my right ear and i have about 30-40% hearing in my left without my hearing aid, which is alot but it’s still so difficult to communicate sometimes. some days i feel like my hearing is going to dissapear and then other days i feel like i have more! it’s so hard.
January 20th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
hmm…I’d call myself hard of hearing actually but…sometimes ‘deaf’ usually is self-referential when people see my hearing aid.
oh and btw, I updated my website…:D
January 20th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Ah yes the what do we call ourselves debate.
Lette: I am very much like you and probably similar audiologically too. I’m severely deaf by label, but below 900Hz I don’t think I get anything useful other than distortion. I FEEL the tones on the hearing tests before I hear them - which makes it hard to discriminate what is feeling and what is hearing (I’d say they were overlapping anyway.
There are some people I usually hear extremely well, so my mum and my partner and a handful of other people I know very well. I hear women MUCH much better than men - which is hard to explain without people assuming I’m being sexist. Part of it is the frequency response of womens/mens voices, part of it is how men and women usually speak, modulation (change in tone between words) and clarity of lipreading. Beards don’t make it much harder to hear, unless they’re really big ones and the man is being mumbly anyway.
I find my hearing or at least ability to utilise my residual hearing varies massively from day to day and it isn’t always correlated to how tired I feel.
On a good day I follow my partner without lipreading much of the time, usually because I understand her context and she tends to give me context first, content after. Other days I can’t hear her at all, looking at her, with context and about something REALLY simple - this gets very frustrating as I know I normally hear better. This is where supplementation of what she is saying with BSL/SSE is extremely handy. Sometimes I am so ‘deaf’ the only useful communication medium is typing on a computer which we do sometimes do. I have learned not to stress about the bad days, ’shit’ happens and we will use the most accurate communication medium, or wait for a better time.
My main problem is preamble before someone speaks, I won’t often know someone is speaking even if there is no other noise in the room. It is like my brain shuts down and isn’t listening for audio data. This is where people need to call my name several times and ensure I actually give an acknowledgement signal, or even tap me on the arm. Sometimes when I’m really out of it I will respond, but I will have no memory of the conversation happening. I sometimes space out in noisy situations like this and have been known to do it in shops/takeaway counters even when I’m desperately trying to watch for the serving person to speak…
I find I also need time to process people’s voices. I think of it as analogous to storing voice samples and matching realtime data with my stored data and using that as a pattern to ‘pattern match’ what people are saying. I find it is useful to know where someone comes from as I can usually cross-match speakers with similar accents.
Once I have someone’s speech patterns matched I usually am able to reapply that knowledge/memory at another time, so the time I spend with people is cumulative. The amount of time it takes to pattern-match people varies massively and some people never really get mapped well in my brain.
When I worked in the library with up to 12 part and fulltime staff I was able to explain that my hearing varies and that if I appear to ‘ignore’ someone it is almost certainly that I’ve not heard them even if feels that I should have heard them. It took me a while to pattern-match people but after a few weeks I was able to follow everyone pretty much without apparent effort. I made it very clear that people could ask me anything and I wouldn’t be offended.
In a group of less than 20 who I see regularly it’s easy to explain about the variable hearing. Larger groups are difficult because as you say people get confused and are inclined to disbelieve you. I’m always happy to dig out my audiogram and indeed play people the emulated hearing files.
If anyone here has an audiogram which shows what they hear with and without aids I’m always happy to try and make an emulated music and speech MP3 to demonstrate to hearies what you actually hear. At best hearing aids sound like bad AM radio which is something most hearies can understand.
I played my emulated files at some friends who have known me a while and they were shocked by the dramatic loss in volume as well as the quality of the sound. With hearing aids I get pretty good sound pickup, but still nothing like what a hearie gets.
I tend to use the word deaf, legal and definition terms be damned. I hate/despise/loathe the word ‘hearing impaired’ with a passion and will never use it to describe myself. If I have to I’ll use hard-of-hearing but as ‘HOH’. I use the word deaf because it is the easiest to say, hear and lipread - and it cuts the crap and says it how it is. VERY few people are totally deaf, just like very few people are totally blind. No two deaf people are alike and therefore any deaf awareness should take that into account.
I don’t stand for other people telling me what I can and cannot call myself - audiologists have tried and I will argue and refuse to back down. The ‘D’deaf community uses the word deaf and if I am being strictly accurate I say ‘partially’ deaf….
January 25th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Personally, I dont want to be called deaf altho it’s obvious to
others that I’m really deaf. When I have to inform others of my
hearing problem, I tell them I’m just hard of hearing. It’s quite
common among us that at home we can communicate fairly well, and like
Natalya, I also find it hard to communicate with men, perhaps because
most men find it discorteous to raise their voice when talking to women.
My daughter gave me a name, though. I’m her “clap activated mum”. Lol.
She has observed that there are sounds I can hear like clap, or metal
being hit (?) so she had an idea. Everytime she wants to call my attention
and I am far from her she would make one clap and sure enough I would
turn my head to where the clap came from.
I read from a deafs site about someone who’s organizing a coalition for the
hearing challenged communicators. Hearing challenged? Dont you think that’s
way cool!:)
January 25th, 2007 at 11:50 am
LOL Hearing calanged, thats great
yeah i have a huge problem hearing men!! its wierd some men I cant hear at all it really depends on the voice level of the individual weather they are high pitched men, or those who talk loud enough for me to hear, which is a rare few 
February 18th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Yah hearing people get mad at me when it seems like my hearing varies. they think I’m using it to my advantage or something. Whether its because my hearing depends on lots of things i don’t notice, or because I lipread more than they think I don’t know.
And well, I know that some people are deafer than others, but all hard of hearing people have probably experienced those times when you can’t hear and you want to, or its awkward, or boring, or people are mad at you (and your mad at yourself) or your tense and trying to get every word. It brings up all these others time when you couldn’t hear. so no matter how deaf you are, i think we’re all people who’ve experienced the shit side of listening.
I grew up among hearing people, but im planning on giving up my hearing aids at some point and finding a deaf community. Hearing people are really nice, and they help me a lot, but there is something missing i think.
June 4th, 2007 at 6:36 am
What do the audiograms look like to be mildly deaf? I took one when I joined the army and one
two years later when I re-uped. I have both audiograms and the second one the scores in my right ear
alot different.