Impact of hearing loss on daily activities and quality of life

¶ … Deaf Ears: An Exercise in Understanding

The hearing world intersects with the deaf world all the time. As a hearing person, I count many hearing impaired people as friends and I feel that I generally have a good sense of what they go through to make their way in a society dominated by sound. By depriving myself of hearing for one day through the use of earplugs, I was suddenly privy to insights about deafness that might not have otherwise occurred to me. I came away from the experience with a greater understanding of the deaf world, including the disorientation and fear that people with hearing impairments must integrate into their lives.

It is easy to go without realizing how much one interacts verbally on a given day until that function is impaired. In attempting to talk to family, friends, and coworkers, I found myself struggling to make sense of the muffled auditory information that I was receiving while simultaneously reading lips (provided that the person speaking to me was looking in my direction). The effort it took to both listen and understand deprived me of feeling I had effectively passed information, gotten work done, built camaraderie, or other normal goals of conversation. The experience was marked by a general sense of confusion as to whether I was being heard and whether I was hearing others correctly. It was not just that I was disoriented; other people looked at me as if I was missing out on something. A recent study showed that "speakers with hearing loss who do not have good SI [speech intelligibility] are evaluated less positively [by peers] than individuals with normal hearing" (Most, Weisel & Tur-Kaspa, 1999, p. 103). An article about the deaf experience in the workplace stated that "the majority of hearing- impaired people pretend to understand communication and/or to avoid social interaction ... This acting-out results in frustration, embarrassment, isolation and stress" (M Backenroth-Ohsako, Wennberg & Klinteberg, 2003). I felt the constant need to put those people at ease, causing me further frustration.

Other activities proved extremely challenging, and in many instances caused a large degree of fear. Walking down the street, a normally mindless activity, became fraught with potential peril. A study about elderly people with sensory perception ailments mentioned that falling injuries can be caused by "social isolation, loneliness, frustration, and depression induced by a sense of helplessness or loss of self-confidence-or the inability to hear environmental warning sounds like the blowing of a car horn or people approaching on a crowded sidewalk" (Tideiksaar, 2003). Though I am not elderly, perhaps I can relate to this experience because I, like those studied, was faced with suddenly having to adjust to an unfamiliar world, not unlike many who develop a hearing loss during their life (rather than being born with one).