Help Me Hear You
Because I'm hearing impaired:
- You will always have my rapt attention.
- I have a keen attention to detail since I rely on visual
context cues to interpret speech and lip-reading, so I'm on
the ball and 100% in the game. You can benefit from my
attention to detail.
- I will always verify what you've told me to make sure I
understand your situation and what it is you want to
accomplish with your mortgage, insurance, law of attraction
class, or jewelry purchase.
- I will get the most important information in writing, so
that we both know it's correct.
Sounds funny, but you don't even get that kind of accuracy
with a hearing person! Not every impairment has to be a
handicap. I work very hard to use my condition to make
me better at what I do rather than using it as an excuse for
not measuring up. I know I have an impairment and I work
very hard to hear every little thing. I can understand
the frustration people often have when people with perfectly
good ears don't listen to a thing they've said.
How'd it happen?
I don't know what causes it. It runs in the family on my mother's side. I started
failing hearing tests in high school. They thought maybe
I had a head cold. Life goes on. I didn't think
too much about it until later because the hearing loss never was
significant enough to impact me in any noticeable way. About 1996
I started having troubles hearing on the phone and asking for
a few more repeats in person and then it was downhill from there.
I had increasing trouble hearing people at work. I
stopped hearing the small bird and cricket sounds we all take
for granted because they are such a part of the background of
life that we can't even imagine not hearing them. I
stopped hearing people talk to me when I was facing away from
them. I lost more and more and more. To this day I
continue to lose and they don't know what the bottom is.
It could be that my hearing never gets any worse than it is
today... or I could wake up tomorrow with a bad head cold and
never hear anything again. It's sad and scary to think
about, so I try not to think about it too much.
What can be done?
Not a whole lot. From what I understand, I'm not a
candidate for a cochlear implant and hearing aids will only
help me while I have neural hearing left. So I'm opting
for hearing aids and hoping for a miracle. I've done a
lot of study on my own because there is no better advocate for
you than yourself (the second best is me) and they say yeast
issues can cause or exacerbate deafness. If that's true,
then perhaps there is some hope for that miracle yet.
Keep your fingers crossed!
It's my goal to get hearing aids in 2007. They are
not covered by most insurance plans, so hearing aids are about
a $5,000 "luxury". I guess I would have to agree since
good hearing is currently a luxury I don't have.
This is why I started
my own charity
to help other people who find themselves in the same
predicament as I did.
Thank you for your understanding...
So in the mean time, I will continue to be proactive about
my hearing loss, which means you will have my rapt attention
every time you speak, I'll be extra careful with your facts
just to make sure I have them right, and I'll give you extra
ways to contact me since voicemail is difficult for me to
hear. If you don't have any other way to leave me a
message, go ahead and leave me a voicemail. If I can't
hear it well enough, I'll ask my boyfriend to tell me what it
says.
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