Lipreading Mom

A week ago, I had cochlear implant surgery in my left ear. I can’t hear anything in that ear and won’t until the implant is activated later this month. I wear a hearing aid in my other ear, and it only amplifies noises.

This means I am deaf. 

I received a diagnosis of progressive bilateral hearing loss two decades ago. The deafness had likely been around a long time. It was the second time in my life I’d met with an audiologist. The first time was when the audiologist told me as a kid to pay attention.

I was six years old. The listening lab in kindergarten class was a semi-circle table with headsets worn by classmates. The objective was to listen to an audio story and then discuss with the teacher. The story’s words were a bunch of aahs and oohs mumbled by a female voice. What was she saying? Why did the other kids know what to discuss with the teacher after the audio story ended and I didn’t?

Afterward I told my parents, or maybe my teacher did. I remember going to an audiologist’s office and being given headphones to wear in a listening booth. Instead of words that sounded like aahs and oohs, I heard a few beeps. Every time I heard a beep, I pushed a button on a device that looked like a game controller. It was like a game that I wanted to master. When I didn’t hear any beeps, I waited about three seconds and pushed the button anyway. 

“Your daughter’s hearing is normal,” is what the audiologist told my mom. “She just needs to pay attention.” 

I won the game!

Childhood was like that: part of a guessing game as to what people were saying or what sounds I heard and where they came from. I remember my family saying I walked and talked really loud, but that didn’t make any sense because I couldn’t hear my own footsteps and I didn’t intend to shout. 

I remember friends asking why I didn’t answer to my name from several feet away when I was looking at them, but I never heard my name. People from behind bumped into me in crowded places, and I didn’t know they were behind me until I heard the mumbled words that became loud like they were shouting at me.  

It was a game of figuring out what people were saying or why they were mad at me. It was making sense of jumbled words and frustrations that didn’t make any sense. 

I got creative with making up the stuff I thought people said to me. 

When I heard “Wha oh ah uh?” I invented the words “What are you up to, huh?”

When I heard “Ooh eh ah uh ee,” my creative mind processed this as “Who are you and why?”

Sometimes I’d answer something silly like, “Oh, you know” or “Nothin much.”

Most of the time as these word puzzle pieces settled inside my brain, I tried to piece their mismatched patterns together correctly and in order. 

There was the puzzle piece of my sisters nudging at me to Wake up, pay attention. 

There was the puzzle piece from my kindergarten teacher who said I had a talking habit because I talked when she was trying to teach and I needed to nip that talking habit in the bud and listen.

There were several puzzle pieces from frustrated family members and strangers. They mumbled names like horse head and stubborn Shanna. Someone mumbled about how book smart I was but I didn’t have any common sense.

The game of living with progressive hearing loss is about making sense of words when I can’t hear. I usually lose at this game because people tell me I heard them wrong or gave an incorrect answer to what they said.

I am tired of playing this game, you know?