Listed below are comments made by HeartSinger (U10482925) between Wednesday, 26th November 2008 and Monday, 5th October 2009

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• The shame of wearing hearing aids

  7:23pm on 05 Oct 2009

  People often assume that stigma or pride is what drives people to put their hearing aid in the drawer instead of their ear.
  
  Yes, these too can be motivations. But it would be overly simplistic to assume that these are the only reasons why some people decline to wear hearing aids.
  
  Simply put, hearing aids DON'T ALWAYS HELP.
  
  If your hearing loss is really profound, then it may be impossible to amplify the sound loud enough to actually start helping before it starts to hurt. Deaf people do tend to be able to tolerate much louder sounds than hearing people, which does grant far more latitude in terms of the amount of amplification you could theoretically supply. But actual tolerance levels can still very a great deal, and not always in perfect correlation to the level of hearing loss: it is possible for a person to be so deaf (or simply, so sensitive to sound) that amplified sound starts to hurt before they gain any benefit from it.
  
  I sort of have this with my left ear, so I don't bother with a hearing aid for my left ear. I only wear one in my right ear, because that's the only ear that really hears enough to benefit in a significant way from a hearing aid.
  
  Also, it is very commonplace for many deaf people to have difficulty not only with volume but also with clarity. Many of us hear sound in a garbled way even if we do not necessarily recognize this. (I have this issue but did not realize it until I was in adulthood because the way I hear seems perfectly normal to me -- this is how I have heard things all my life. It was not until an audiologist asked me if I ever need to turn *down* the volume to make the sound seem clearer that the light dawned on me. For people who only have an issue with volume rather than clarity, sound will seem clearer the more you amplify. But if you receive sound in a somewhat garbled way (even if you don't recognize it as such!), then amplification may only help up to a point. Beyond that point, any further amplification just increases the distortion in the sound and therefore actually makes it *harder*, not easier, to understand speech or recognize sounds in the environment. If you've grown up deaf like I have, and especially if you've always worn a hearing aid, then you just learn how much amplification helps in which circumstances and you learn to experiment with different levels of amplifications as needed. But I can imagine that someone new to being deaf, or just new to wearing a hearing aid, might not be prepared for the need to play with the volume control and might give up before they find a level that works for them. And then, of course, there are people who experience so much sound distortion all the time that no amount of amplification helps at all, full stop.
  
  So some of the people who choose not to wear a hearing aid might be making that choice due to a genuine, sober assessment that a hearing aid simply doesn't help. Or at least, not the particular model or models of hearing aids they had tried. (If sound garbling is an issue, then it might help a bit to choose some variety of digital hearing aid which at least is supposed to have a clearer quality of found. However, that doesn't eliminate the problem, it only helps avoid additional sound distortion that would otherwise compound the problem.)
  
  I should note that there is no good, reliable way to "test" for how clearly a person hears sound. The nearest they can get to it is with speech discrimination scores. If they do hearing tests the same way in the UK as they do in the US, there is this set of words that have equal stress on the first and second syllables that are used in speech discrimination tests -- words like "side walk" "ice cream" "cow boy" "hot dog" etc. These are uttered in a monotone by an audiologist who holds up a paper or something to cover their mouth. The more words in the list that you understand without being able to lipread them the higher your speech discrimination score. (The equalized stress and monotone rhythm are important for ensuring that the deaf person is understanding the actual speech sounds, not just guessing what the words might be based on rhythm or stress patterns. In real life, as long as people don't mumble, I rely on rhythm and stress patterns as an aide to speech comprehension.) An experienced audiologist can look at your audiogram and make a ballpark guess where your speech discrimination score should probably be ... if it's lower then there might be a sound distortion effect involved.
  
  Hearing people, too, can sometimes hear sound in a garbled way, except with hearing people (where there is no difficulty with volume issues) it's called "auditory processing disorder." I suppose technically it's still "auditory processing disorder" when deaf people experience it, but I haven't heard that label used with deaf people (even though not all deaf people have it, only some). I only see that label used with hearing people.

• Who needs airport assistance?

  02:33am on 12 Jun 2009

  If people have to start providing medical evidence of need for airport assistance, then what do you do about people with temporary injuries? Or, what do you do about people who may not need assistance 95% of the time but do still have a chronic condition that could mean they might need it another 5% of the time?
  
  My partner once got injured literally between our apartment and the car taking us to the airport. She didn't need a wheelchair assistance but did need more leg room than usual (and some ice) for her poor knee. Fortunately the airport people didn't ask for a medical examination before they gave it to her! (We took her to the hospital first thing when we landed and she was on crutches a few days)
  
  In my case, I was injured during a trip out of country. By the time I came back my foot was partly healed, but not enough to really let me move fast (my partner who had taken the same flight a few weeks earlier told me she had to literally run to make the next flight) and also not really enough to let me handle a lot of luggage safely (though I didn't really understand this until my foot started hurting again just from trying to carry my carry-on bag when I was waiting to get on the plane for my first flight -- I didn't know at the time that my foot was permanently damaged, I still thought that it was mostly recovered and would eventually return to "normal")
  
  Since that first major injury, my foot has been prone to repeated injuries. Now that I have had enough years to get a better sense for the new limitations of my foot, I have found ways to compenstate that allow me to retain indepence. For example, instead of a regular carry-on bag, I bought a nice, compact suitcase with four "spinner" wheels (can be pulled forward, or sideways, or even spun around). This is much easier to manage than a suitcase with two wheels because you don't even have to lean it to operate it, just pull it along. On my "good foot days" this is pretty much all the accommodation I need. And now that I understand how to take care of my foot in order to prevent the more serious reinjuries, most days are "good foot days" or, if not "good," then at least "sort of mostly okay foot days"
  
  But on a really "bad foot day" I might be on crutches, and might need a little assistance. But, I wouldn't ever have medical certification, just my say so and the fact that I'm waving crutches.

• Charlie's Subtitle Diary

  12:31pm on 26 Nov 2008

  Ever noticed that sometimes the subtitles don't disappear at the end of a show when they're supposed to? Sometimes they just linger on the screen. (I read somewhere about why this happens: apparently the way subtitles usually work is that there is one signal to toggle them on and then there's supposed to be another signal to toggle them off. But if that signal isn't sent out properly, then the captions just stay up there. It's kind of as if you set your word processing to "italics" font and then forgot to set it back to regular text again at the proper point.)
  
  One time, this led to a bizzarre scene in which the subtitles on my TV said "Have a nice day" (I think this must have come from the end of a news broadcast or something) ... but the scene being depicted were bloody scenes of war. Not exactly a set of images you associate with the sentiments implicit in "Have a nice day."

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