Lesson 4: Skills For Surviving Hearing Loss
Lesson 4 will conclude this course by introducing you to other skills we need to survive hearing loss that didn't fit in the first three lessons. Maintaining your speech, how to feel safer, how people can help you, ways to communicate and more will be covered in this lesson.
Introduction
There are still some areas to cover in our quest to cope with hearing loss. We’ve learned how to deal with the emotional trauma, the recovery process and assistive devices. Now it’s time to learn how to deal with ourselves and other people.
We can communicate without our hearing and we can do most of the things we used to do. But we have to learn what to watch out for, how to feel safer and how to understand others. The most important thing we have to learn is to let the people around us know we can’t hear them. Only then can they begin to help us.
Verbal communication becomes a challenge for us and we have to develop skills we didn't need before. We have to become intuitive and we sometimes have to think fast.
We can't expect to always get every word that's said to us. We're going to miss some and it won't always be possible for someone to repeat the whole thing. We need to pick up key words, cues and become terrific at guessing. Yes, guessing. Sometimes we have to take our best guess at what the missing word might be. For example, suppose you hear someone say, "I'm going to the " ________" in the morning."
To you, the word might have sounded like "circus". Does that fit? Is the circus in town? Does it sound logical considering the speaker? Or would "office" be more likely? You might guess office in this case because you know that person has an office and it seems more logical.
We can’t always have someone at our side to interpret for us, whether through sign language, speech reading, written words or gestures. The only way we can feel strong and confident and secure is to know how to compensate for our loss.
Speechreading (formerly known as lip reading) is very helpful, but by itself, it's not as accurate as we'd like. American Sign Language, the language of the Deaf Culture, is astonishingly intuitive and to the point.
Hazards exist everywhere and we constantly have to be on the lookout. You might not hear something as basic as water running and have to be aware of your surroundings at all times.
Now we’ll venture into those areas and strip away the last vestiges of fear and doubt.
Optional Reading
For this lesson please read the following:
- Hearing Loss & Hearing Aids Pages 178-199 and/or
- Coping With Hearing Loss Pages 141 - 163 and/or
- Missing Words Pages 120 - 212
