Dealing with hearing loss has become a fact of life for me. I inherited a genetic hearing loss from my maternal side of the family. My grandmother, mother, sister, daughter and niece all have the same hearing loss. It is a progressive loss meaning that I was born with normal hearing, but over time my loss will increase. I am currently in my mid-thirties and I have a 60 to 65% loss at this time. I am moderately hard of hearing, my mother who is in her sixties, is considered profound. I know that I will follow this similar pattern.

Because my deafness has always been with me, I have learned to adapt and modify my day to day living in order to meet my needs. I have reached the point now that I will need to start wearing hearing aids on a daily basis, as I am finding it more difficult to follow conversations. My philosophy has always been that my disability will not go away, so I need to learn how to compensate.

I can "read lips", but that is only about 80% accurate. There are many obvious downfalls to reading lips, such as many words have the same mouth formations, men with full mustaches and beards are difficult to follow, people who cover their mouth when talking, the dark, eating, and my favorite...cartoons! I have had many good laughs when what I thought I heard and saw does not match with what was actually said.

Closed-captioning has really been beneficial for me for watching movies and regular tv. I keep them on all the time. The downfall of it is misspellings, and sometimes whole senteneces being left out. Some stations and movies have excellent word for word captioning and others seem like my 10 year old are doing them. Another plus to the captioning, my children are better at reading!

I always ask people to repeat things for clarity. I will actually have them write it down if I still can't follow what they are saying. In many situations, if I think that hearing will be an issue, I make sure that everyone is aware of my deafness. I find that most people are cooperative.

I don't consider my hearing loss the worst thing that could have happened to me. It is annoying in certain social situations, and when trying to do business. However, there are certain aspects of hearing loss that really don't bother me. There are so many useless noises in the world that I can't hear. One day I was practicing wearing my hearing aids and I was cleaning the house, after about an hour I started noticing lots of different noises that I had never really heard before. The most amusing being that my big toe cracks when I walk; I had never heard it before!

Hearing loss is manageable. I have been "dealing" with it for over 30 years. You just do what you need to do to get by and to meet your needs.

Learn more about this author, Elizabeth Hadzic.
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