letters lament

Dear Me: Deaf

Hello again. Do you remember back when I first talked to you, or myself, and tried to describe who I was? This letter's been planned for quite a while. 

Deaf. 

Alright, so first, I'll ask you a question. What do you think of when you see that word? Sign language, maybe. People who can't hear? The people with the strange voices, or ones that can't talk at all because they never learned? Idiots? 

I really hope you don't think of idiots. If you do, please stop reading. It'll just make it harder to continue. 

When I see that word, I don't truly think of myself. Let me explain. When you're deaf, most of the time you know sign language, you can't hear at all, you may be able to talk, and you might read lips pretty well. For me, that's not the case. I'm fifty percent deaf. Each of my ears only hear half, and it makes hearing normal speech a pain in the ass. 

Maybe this is just me finally wanting to explain to someone how my ears work and how they came to be, and how I feel about them. Therefore, let's start when I was a baby. 

Premature little Lexi, two months early. In the hospital for two weeks, in the PICU. The doctors have decided to give you steroids. Lovely. The problem? It accelarates every growth except for your ear drums. Obviously, since you're an infant and your family is extremely loud as it is, no one notices the lack of growth until six years later. 

Once the little girl goes to school, everything changes. She's really smart, beyond the years of her other classmates, but that doesn't help with her inability to hear others. Quite frequently, she's misunderstanding other classmates, or not hearing her teachers, even though she's learned to read lips without thinking about it. Finally, her parents take her to the doctor.

Oh, how she loves that doctor. They stick needles in her arm once a week, or twice a month, depending on when she's summoned to the clinic for an all day stay. Under the MRI, she wiggles and is told to stay still. They nearly had to sedate her, and it scared the little girl into staying put. They took more blood still, and examined her head multiple times. A brief memory of the brain pictures flashes; it was lit up like a christmas tree, and they told her she was extremely smart for a five year old. They said she could be great. 

Eventually, she got her hearing aids. That included countless hearing tests, over and over again saying the same words. Hot dog. Airplane. Dog house. Ice cream. Over and over again until she already knew the order: she did a lot better on the hearing tests that she should've. Therefore, they did them again and again, because the little girl was too young to understand it. Barely six years old, talking about a cochlear implant. Hearing aids it was. 

Once she got them, they didn't help much. 

Flashforward.

Let's go back to the different point of view, because that little girl was me, and I'm still that little girl, sometimes. Hearing aids and tests and blood. Stupid fucking hospitals. If any of you have ever had an extended stay at a hospital, you know how it feels. I'm just talking about my ears, for god's sake, not my epilepsy. Hospitals are sad places. They suck. 

The hearing loss, the hearing aids: it helped a bit. It was easier to hear people talking, if they were facing you. Once they turned away, the words floated around and didn't make sense. Reading lips is still a valid skill. 

The worst part? Ignorant people. Here's something I'd like to share with you. If someone asked you "what" after you said something that they didn't catch, would you repeat it? Would you? Even if they asked you to repeat it more than once? If you yell at them, or say nevermind, that's a bad fucking choice. 

Don't roll your eyes at me, got it? The problem is that you don't understand what they go through. What if saying nevermind just makes it worse? Yeah, that's it. 

Here's a list of what to do and what not to do around people who are deaf, or part deaf. Please, read it. 

#1. Never talk in their ear. Never fucking do it. It's demeaning. 

#2. If they're watching your lips, don't give them a weird look. They're reading them. 

#3. Never use any form of sign language, unless you know what you're doing. No fucking baby sign language. That's the most embarrassing piece of shit I've ever watched. 

#4. Don't yell. Sure, raise your voice a little bit, but never yell. 

#5. If they ask you to repeat something, repeat it. Don't say nevermind, and don't look annoyed. Don't. 

What to do? 

Give them eye contact. If they don't hear something, and ask? Repeat it for them, or let them know what someone else said. That way, they don't feel like their completely and utterly left out. 

Don't make them feel alone, because it's really easy for people to leave you.