Hearing Loss

Lesson 4: Skills For Surviving Hearing Loss

How Others Can Help You

People can’t help you unless you let them know you need help and then tell them what you need.

I’ve found the person with whom I communicate best is my husband. I tend to rely on him a lot in group situations and he came with me when I took a course. He was allowed to sit with me and take notes and keep me up to speed on what was going on in the class.

Most people are understanding if you tell them you can’t hear. It’s been my experience that they will go out of their way to help you, as in the course, where they let my husband in for free. In restaurants where there are a lot of choices to make, he orders for me and on an airplane he tells me what the announcements are.

He can’t be with me all the time though. When I am out without him, I let others help me. If I’m paying for something and I can’t understand the amount, they'll either show me the register or write it down for me. On the subway, when I couldn’t hear an announcement, the woman beside me was happy to repeat it.

I’ve learned to tell people who assist me in stores that I can’t hear because they tend to call out through a dressing room door or curtain. Now when I shop, they know to rattle the door or curtain so I can look out and read their lips. A small gesture on their part, but a great help to me.

People help me make and answer phone calls – even the Bell Relay Operator who handles my calls on my VCO. All around us are people who are willing to help if they only know we need it. Don’t be shy. Let them help.

Tips for Better Communication

Some things seem obvious only after we become aware of them. Here are some tips for making it easier to talk to someone:

1. Tell people you need them to get your attention before speaking. We need to know someone is talking to us since we can’t use sound as a normal cue.
2. Ask people to face you when they talk to you. We need to watch faces for cues and read their lips.
3. Let people know if you need them to speak louder or not. A lot of hearing loss is loss of clarity and more volume won’t help. In fact, with some people, myself included, it makes it worse. The sounds I can’t distinguish become more distorted.
4. Try to talk in a well lit place. What we can’t see, we can’t read. If it’s too dark to read lips, we can’t “hear”.
5. Make sure people know to keep their mouths as visible as possible. If they block their mouths with their hands, we can’t see their lips moving. Nor can we see them if they turn away from us. We definitely can't speechread if they're behind us talking to our backs.
6. Try to talk in a quiet(er) spot. Background noise drowns out any chance we have to pick up some of the words.
7. Ask people you talk to to try changing a word if you're just not getting it. Sometimes no matter how many times a word is repeated, it's just not something you can hear (for example I was unable to understand the word "gate", so my husband switched to the word "fence").
8. Ask people if they can write down important things you might not hear. For instance, names, phone numbers, appointments and addresses.

There is one more thing that must be said and you should let people know how important this is.

There are times when even people with good hearing don't hear what someone says. Sometimes when asked to repeat what they've said, the person speaking will respond with "Never mind". A hearing person might not be bothered by that, but to those of us who can't hear, it hurts.

It's happened to me many times and I'd rather face someone's frustration than that kind of disinterest from them. Let people know that if it was worth saying the first time, you'd really like to hear it - that even if they decide it wasn't worth saying, you're more sensitive to the "never mind" than someone else might be.

As Kay Thomsett says in Missing Words on pages 209 & 210, "Never say 'never mind'."

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