Allegrophobia

Okay, so there isn't really a clinical term out there for the fear of being late, but somebody with a pretty funny sense of humor dubbed it Allegrophobia at some point in time.  I have always been annoyed by late arrivals and the idea of arriving late to an appointment, work, or class is strong enough to keep me up all night.

This fear is compounded by the fact that I cannot hear an alarm clock.  So how is it that the deaf and hard of hearing ever get anywhere on time in the wee hours of the morning?  For me, it was a struggle for many years.  As far back as high school before I even realized that my hearing loss was a problem, I had trouble waking up on time.  I had a little bedside alarm that would sound off bright and early waking up everyone in the house except for me.  Apparently this was a problem for my dad.  He's not the kind of guy that just runs out and buys gifts to show you he cares, but I have a foggy, just rudely aroused from an awesome dream, kind of memory of my dad, sitting on the edge of my bed bouncing it up and down a little telling me to rise and shine.  Then I heard it, the terrible clanging bang of the gift he was bringing me.

He handed me a shiny brass alarm clock with two bells on the top.  That thing was loud enough to wake the neighbors.  I didn't know it at the time, but my old alarm clock was waking him up every morning while I kept on snoozing.  He had run down to the drug store and found me a clock that I could hear, a clock so annoying I would jolt out of bed like somebody hit me with a cattle prod.

I carried the golden dreamslayer with me for years until somewhere along the way it was lost, or broken, or most likely thrown against a wall or beat to death with my own bare fists.  It's hard to sleep at night when you know you have to be somewhere the next morning by a specific time.  Marrying my husband was a blessing because he was there to wake me up and for awhile I didn't have to stress about it.  My dog, Cotton (so named because she looks like a dirty old cotton bowl that's sprouted out of the red Texas sand where I grew up) is pretty good about waking me up too.  She doesn't like the sound of the alarm clock.

But eventually, my husband had places to be much earlier than I did and Cotton is not always reliable.  For awhile I used a dual alarm clock that had double alarms set five minutes apart.  If I didn't hear them, Cotton would wake me up just to get me to turn them off.  I also got pretty good at just knowing; most of the time I would think to myself, I need to be up by 7 and I would just automatically wake up at 7.  Not the trustiest way of doing things yet it usually worked. But eventually a time came when that simply wasn't enough.

I had just given birth to Lillian and paid a visit to my audiologist to buy my second set of Oticon hearing aids.  I was discussing my problems about hearing the baby monitor with her when she introduced me to the Sonic Alert System.  I can't believe I didn't discover this sooner.

It's an alarm clock that sounds off at 113 decibels and not only that, it will shake the whole bed until you turn it off.  And it acts as a receiver for other products including the baby monitor, door bell, fire alarm, and stove timer.  It can also be connected to any regular bedside lamp that will flash until you hit the shut-the-hell up button.  She used my insurance to pay for the whole system.  I have flashing strobe lights that plug into outlets throughout my house, the super clock, a vibrating bed, a flashing lamp, and a noise receiver in my daughter's room.  If the doorbell rings, the baby cries, or the alarm goes off, so do the strobes, shakers, and lamps.  And finally, I can rest in peace.

Random Acts of Deafness (1)

Random Acts of Deafness is something I am creating in an effort to catergorize all of the unconventional experiences I encounter as a hard of hearing person.  In these posts I'll give you an idea of things that happen randomly in public as a result of or a product of my deafness. I hope to post these as they happen or as I remember past experiences.

Episode 1:
I was recently interviewed for a job.  The interviewer asked me if I wanted to answer phones all day.  I responded that phone work is difficult for me because I am hard of hearing.  Before I even finished the sentence, the interviewer stood up to leave, exclaiming, "That's all I needed to hear."  ...are you kidding me?  That's like saying, "See what I mean?" to a blind guy!  They did bring in someone else to interview me for a position that was more suitable for me.  But seriously, did he have to use those particular words?  A more sensitive person could have been easily offended; to me, it's just another Random Act of Deafness.

Episode 2:
On a lighter note, I took my truck to be inspected.  My hair was pulled up into a pony tail so my hearing aids were visible if one were to actually look at my face long enough to observe anything. Autoshops are always noisy, but I managed to figure out that the man behind the desk wanted me to go out to my truck so he could get the vehical specs and drive it into the shop.  He had to repeat himself plenty of times!

I waited inside, keeping busy with the difficult decision making process that one only encounters when faced with two magazine choices: Family Circle or Deer Hunter.  At least they didn't complicate matters by throwing in People or Golf Digest.  After about 30 minutes, a shadow fell across the rifle ad in the hunting magazine.  I saw that he was calling my name and heard it about the time I looked up.  Standing in front of me, the guy from behind the counter waited until he had my full attention, looked me directly in the eye, and said, "Heather, your truck is ready." 

I was surprised that a random guy in a noisy autoshop would recognize that I couldn't hear him unless I could see him, make an effort to come across the room, get my attention, and verify that he was being heard.  I'm not sure if he was accustomed to dealing with a hard of hearing person in his life or if he is just man with both common sense and compassion.  It was a pleasant surprise and another Random Act of Deafness; one that happens so very rarely.

...until next time,

How It All Got Started, Part III

I left my sleezy, albeit, super-fun bartending jobs, yep, all of them (at one point, I had 3 going at once), after I became seriously involved with the man that is now my husband.  For some strange and unknown reason, he had a problem with me working in dive bars until three in the morning.

I was unsure of the next step, was finished with junior college, and decided it was time for a full time job. So I took employment with a compliance company.  It was my job to learn all of the interstate transportation laws and arrange the necessary travel documents for truckers rolling over state lines.  I liked this job.  The work was simple in that it was routine, yet it was challenging in that each state has different regulations and each caller knew less and less about them than the one before him.  I was a problem solver and a helper; it felt good to know that I was responsible for getting hemorrhoid pads, Corvettes, and salty hams from one side of the country to the other.  But the most challenging part of the job was that it was phone work and it was competitive.

How it worked was that truckers called in and said, "I need to get a load from point A to point B, what do I need to be legal?" I would decipher the laws and contact the different state agencies, arrange for the permits, and get them to the drivers in specific locations along their travel routes at specific times without wasting any of the drivers time.  Not a good thing to have a driver sitting at a truck stop in BFE, waiting 5 hours for a permit.  Time is money, right?

We had a ginormous room with about 60 compliance specialists manning the phones and our computers kept up with the number and length of calls, $$$.  It became a competition between the employees to see who could end the day with the most permits and the most cash for the company...I'm just a little bit maybe sorta competitive, so I enjoyed it; I always got the most; I was good, real good.

All the states have different regulations.  You had to know your stuff and if you got it wrong...well, there are several states that don't do redos.  If they print it, you pay for it, and they don't reprint without another fee.  We're talking $80 or so for a permit in some states.

I got a call from a lady in Oregon needing a permit to bring her driver into the state.  Oregon is one of the hard, expensive states.  Lots of rules, no refunds.  If the permit is not perfect, driver gets a ticket, no typos allowed, no leniency.  Nobody wants a pissed off truck driver knowing the address of their place of employment, so you better get it right.  She called the name of the trucking company, The Nut Company.  When the driver showed up at the arranged pick-up destination to get his permit, he called me immediately...and a few other choice words.

It was supposed to say, The Nett Company.  Oregon does their permits live, meaning they only issue them during government office hours via a little old lady with a plaque above her desk that reads "Helen, Secretary of the Year, 1976." And it takes her about five hours to issue one.  So not only is the company I work for out $80 (did I mention, they don't do redos?), but I have to tell this guy, I can't get him another permit until tomorrow and only after somebody's great Aunt Helen has watered the office ivy, had her coffee, and taken her morning dump.  Now he has to sleep in his rig at the truck stop under the neon lights and his shipment is going to be late.  Here goes the domino effect. Yeah, I was thinking of a four letter word about that time
.....................................................................................quit.

And that's just one example of the hardships a person with a hearing disability has.  I liked that job.  They had decent health benefits, tuition reimbursement, Six Sigma training, free flu shots, and awesome company picnics.  And I really liked the girls at my lunch table.

But I did quit.  I couldn't risk disappointing people, screwing up permits, wasting peoples' time.  I felt bad for that driver and what I cost him.  That was a night away from his family, and his client was pissed even though it was my fault rather than his.  What was he supposed to say, "Some dumb deaf girl in Texas screwed up my shipment."  Who knows what he said.  I resigned that day.

A quick note about the phone work: the only way I managed to do as much of it as I did and for so long was because we wore head pieces attached to the phones.  I could turn them up as loud as I wanted and that managed to work pretty well for me in most cases.

I was already in school at UTD.  I had started that January, 2001.  Blake and I had bought a house in October and were planning our wedding.  I didn't have my hearing aids yet and it was this incident that prompted me to get on the ball and set up the meeting with TRC.  I think that leaving that job proved to them that I could not be a contributing, tax paying member of society without some help.  Anyway, they agreed to buy my hearing aids.

That first semester at UTD was hard to say the least.  It was smaller than UNT but bigger than NCTC.  My professors were tenured, publishing, doctorates who wanted to weed out the cannots from the can dos.  It was hard to be a can do when I couldn't hear the discussions and I was too mousy to talk to them about my hearing problems, but I survived...by the skin of my teeth.  I made my only C that semester.  Made an A in the other class; it was all writing and I can do that with or without ears on just about any subject.

My summer courses started and I still didn't have my hearing aids.  A few weeks into the semester, I finally told my literary analysis professor that I couldn't hear but I was getting hearing aids, if he could just bare with me a couple more weeks.  His reply was "just raise your hand if you need me to repeat anything." HA! I wanted to say, "So I guess, I'll just keep it up the whole class."  He didn't get it; I could not understand a word he said.  When my biology professor told us that our class would be nothing but watching videos every day, I set up a conference with him.  In our meeting, I explained my hearing loss, told him that any type of learning from the videos was impossible for me.  His solution was that I could borrow them after each class and watch them at home.  I asked if they had captions or subtitles.  They didn't.  I barely made a B in that one; if not for the labs, I would have failed.

A couple of weeks before the end of that summer session, my first hearing aids arrived!!!! What a difference!  Straight A's (except for 1 class) until I graduated, cum laude.

Audiowhat?

Audiogram...
An audiogram is a chart or graphic record that is used to record a person's abiltiy to hear sound at certain decibel and frequency levels.
When a person suspects hearing loss, they undergo testing with an audiometer.  I often refer to this as "the box." You go inside a sound proof room, put on the provided head phones, and raise your hand or push a button when you hear the beep.  Each beep is delivered at a different frequency and decibel level.  A decibel is simply a unit used to express the intensity of a sound wave.  The louder the sound, the higher the decibel number.  Speech comes in around 20-50 decibels, leaves rustling-20 decibels, a nightclub or concert is around 110, a hair dryer, about 80.
Take a look at the audiogram below...most of them don't come in rainbow colors but I wanted to show you a few extra things.

The numbers on the left are decibels from soft to loud going down; the numbers across the bottom are frequencies from low to high.
You can see where I boxed in 20-50 to show you where normal speech falls on the sound chart.  Notice the letters on the chart in the blue section.  These are called phonemes, or more simply put, sounds letters make.  You can see that M is around 35 decibels, O is 40 decibels and 750Hz, etc.
I colored the chart to show you the different levels of hearing loss.  A person with normal hearing would fall into the pink area and be able to hear all sounds below it. 
The vertical lines show frequency levels.  Look at the black hand drawn line with the Xes at the top of the chart.  This is what a normal audiogram would look like.  At each frequency, the person raised his or her hand at the beep and the audiologist drew an X.  If the person being tested fails to raise his hand or push a button, the audiologist raises the decibel until the patient can hear it, finally marking an X at the correct level.
The red Xes are mine; I can hear all sounds below my line.  As you can see, my hearing levels are well below the normal speech threshold; you need to be as loud as a hair dryer or vacuum for me to hear you.  My loss is considered moderate to severe.  Without amplification, I am pretty much useless.  I can hear men better than women since their voices are usually lower.  You can see that my Xes take a dip as the frequency increases before coming back up with the really high frequencies.
People who have even a mild loss should consider hearing aids since most speech occurs at that level.  I'm trying to get the courage together to go a whole day without using mine just to see what happens.  When I finally do, I'm sure I'll blog about it!  I'm also curious to see what an audiogram with my hearing aids would look like, definitely not normal, but I'm thinking mild to moderate.

What does hearing loss sound like?

The Phonak site has a great set up that will allow you to click on a sound to hear the way people with normal hearing would hear it.  Then you can click on the same sound to hear it the way someone with a mild loss or a moderate loss hears it.

My loss is moderate to severe and you can actually hear more on the link under "moderate loss" than what I can hear without my hearing aids.  With my aids, it sounds like "mild loss" most of the time, but in noisy situations, it still sounds like a moderate loss.  

Try it...you don't have to download anything, just turn on your speakers.

In my next post, I will explain audiograms, show you my own, and where certain speech sounds fall on the chart.

An Inevitable Involuntary Manifestion: Or How I Learned To Read Lips Without Knowing About It

A few things happen when one begins to lose her hearing, things that are beyond control, involuntary, and absolutely pivotal.  In my previous posts, you read that my hearing loss began in the 5th grade and I somehow managed without hearing amplification to become a junior in college with a 4.0.  And you're probably wondering how I pulled it off...
When hearing loss is progressive, you adapt, even if you don't realize that it's happening.  Simply put, I learned to lip read; honestly put, I learned a lot more than that.
When people speak of lip reading, I believe that they may not fully understand what is actually involved.  Lip reading or speech reading is not simply watching lips and being able to "see" what sounds are made.  It actually involves a whole lot more, such as analyzing body language and using context clues.  Wikipedia defines it as "a technique of understanding speech by visually interpreting the movements of the lips, face and tongue with information provided by the context, language, and any residual hearing."  Basically, you learn to use everything you've got to make out whatever it is you're trying to hear.  Lip readers use cues from the environment and put that together with what is most likely to be said in the given situation. For me, this just happened involuntarily; I didn't look it up or take a class or even ask another deaf person how to do it.  It happened before I even realized it was happening and I was doing it long before I realized I was doing it.
Fortunately, I have a gift for using context clues and solving puzzles.  Maybe I was born with it, or maybe, it's a byproduct of my hearing loss.  Either way, I'm good at this sort of thing.  I can usually figure out what you are saying even if I can not hear all of the words.  But that does not mean I will not ask you to repeat yourself if I did not get it all the first time.  I think that this kind of speech reading is what helped me survive without hearing aids for so long.  Believe me, it is not enough on its own, but it was something that helped me get through life as long as I did without amplification.  Another thing to keep in mind, is that a hearing impaired person is using many more levels of concentration than others might use.  I often find myself exhausted after a night of social activities (even without the wine) and there are some people I know that I'd just rather not make the effort to socialize with because they require so much energy to be understood.  Some of these people get the nod and uh-huh tactic and some of them, I simply avoid as much as possible.  However, most people do not fall into either of these categories and with some effort, can be heard and understood even without my hearing aids.

What can you do to make it easier for the hard of hearing/deaf/hearing impaired to read your lips?

-always face the person you are speaking with
-slow down, avoid slang, especially new or trendy phrases that don't really make sense in context, and mixing languages such as English and Spanish which is fairly common in Texas these days
-be careful not to stand in front of a bright window or light or your face will be shadowed
-mustaches and excessive facial hair can pose a hindrance
-allow only one person in a group to speak at a time
-do not try to exaggerate or speak too loud; this confuses us when we are trying to place context clues and can distort the sound of what little we can still hear
-be sure to enunciate and even slow down a little
-do not talk with food or anything else in your mouth
-get my attention before you begin speaking to me, please don't yell at me, just touch me or say my name when I look at you
-remember some rooms are better situated to hearing than others (acoustics), rooms with carpet, drapes, soft furniture are easier environments than hard floors, tall ceilings, background noise, or even outdoors
-if you have an unfamiliar accent and are soft spoken, be prepared to repeat yourself many times or just write it down

I'm sure to think of more later, but for now, just try to keep these tips in mind.