Welcome to My Deaf World

I'm sitting here in my den typing away with my hearing aids sitting in a Dry and Store box upstairs. I'm listening very intently to any possible sounds but I hear not a single thing. I can see my fingers typing in front of me, but I don't hear the normal "tap,tap,tap" that I do when my hearing aids are perched in my ears.

Welcome to my world.

I'm deaf.

Totally stone deaf without my hearing aids.

My audiogram shows that something has to be as loud as a jet plane taking off before I begin to hear the sound without my hearing aids. Thankfully, the nearest airport is a half hour away. Noise doesn't bother me once my hearing aids are out.

I was born with normal hearing and I was diagnosed with a moderate to severe hearing loss when I was seven. This explains why my speech is close to normal-- my hearing loss occurred after the acquisition of speech. I received my first hearing aid when I was nine, but I mostly got by on lip reading. Sound coming into the hearing aid wasn't clear, which meant that I couldn't use the phone and have an understandable conversation.

I grew up hard of hearing and I didn't use the hearing aid after school or during the summer. When I was nineteen, I was barefooting (waterskiing on bare feet) and I turned to cross the wake and fell sideways. For days, I figured I had water in my ears. Nothing sounded right. Everything was muffled and I couldn't hear people talking.

I had become completely deaf.

Fortunately, I transferred to Northern Illinois University that summer and I stayed on a co-ed floor with other deaf and hard of hearing students. I learned sign language and met my husband there. We got married a couple of years later and had three deaf and hard of hearing kids.

Many people have a hard time understanding what I can hear and what I can't hear. One of most frequent questions I encounter is often, "What can you hear?" Many times, I can identify environmental sounds, such as the phone ringing, a dog barking, a bird chittering, or the doorbell.