A Deaf In the Family

"You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life." - Alex Hailey

These days, my hearing is crap. I can't hear worth a damn in crowded places, or even not so crowded places when there are multiple people talking. Background noise and music does me in, as well as phones and cell phones.

The phone thing is especially difficult as there are certain vocal ranges that are just impossible for me to understand. Women are more difficult on the cell phone as is my uncle, who has a rather deep voice. My friend Georges is impossible.

I hate, HATE, telling people about this. I feel like an idiot when I'm constantly asking people to repeat themselves. On the phone, I blame the phone or the connection. Sometimes, I fake a disconnection and just hang up, and email later.

There are certain people I've told. I try to explain it to friends and family but even they just don't get it. Case in point, last weekend I was filming a short with my husband and some of our friends. One guy talks very softly. I missed about 80% of what he said. I felt like everyone was whispering and trying to cut me out of conversations. Paranoia set in. I was sure that my husband was just ignoring me as I'd ask him questions and he'd walk away. He claims he was answering or did answer. There was so much going on I will never be sure. He has a habit in busy situation of sort of calling out answers as he's moving or talking to other people so he may have been answering me but I thought he was talking to someone else. He tends not to address people directly, as in, "Yes, Lor, we need to move everyone to the other location."

Basically, I'm saying that I'm embarrassed that I'm deaf.

But I'm not really deaf. My ears work, it's my head that doesn't. Ha! So I'm even marginalized there. Does a Central Auditory Processing problem count as deafness? Or hearing impairment? It's a puzzlement.

I often use captions when I watch movies now. The background music and other noises is sometimes too much, or the speakers have accents...whatever. It's just easier to do that then to keep messing with the volume or re-watching segments to catch the dialogue.

Next week I will follow up with my OVR counselor. So far, that little experiment has been perfectly useless. I should qualify for assistance but now that I'm not working I don't know whether or not they'll be interested in helping me. The hearing aid that works best for me is, naturally, the most expensive one. It's about $2500. I nearly fell over when the audiologist told me the price.

Even if I get it, I'm going to be frantic that I'll lose it or break it or something stupid. Really, I'm not the best person with small expensive objects. Things tend to go missing around me. (Ok, I lose them. Or put them somewhere safe - so safe that I don't find them for three years.)

As it stands, I will have to suffer through tomorrow night. There's a showing of the films at the gallery that sponsored the 48 hour film competition. I want to go, obviously. I wrote the script and I think we did a really great job on the project. The Quiet Talker will be there as well, so I've got soft conversation in a noisy group setting to look forward to. Yay! Part of me wishes that Crenshaw would subtly clue people in to what's going on with me so I don't have to announce to everyone that I'm deaf as a post. I'd do it for him. We kind of had a fight about that Sunday night. He was yelling at me because I didn't say anything; I was yelling at him because he should know that if I'm walking away and ignoring what he's saying I probably didn't hear it in the first place.

I shouldn't have to fight about this crap with the people in my family. I shouldn't have to fight about it with my husband. I shouldn't have to fight with OVR.

In the meantime, "Don't make fun of me. I can't hear you."