Some of my deaf history, part 1

I got a wild hair and decided to type up some of my early history in dealing with my hearing loss, a nutshell of this aspect of my life.

I was born hard of hearing, but my hearing loss was not discovered until age 2. At that time I was fitted with hearing aids, one in each ear. I did pretty well and had experiences like being astonished by the sound of the vacuum cleaner and running water. I would wake up in the mornings, stand up in my crib, and when a parent walked into the room I would point to my ear -- "put my hearing aid on!" I had a stuffed bear that I loved, "Bear-bear," and my mom made hearing aids for the bear using buttons and some pipe cleaner. Really cool.

Between the ages of 4-6 I lost more of my hearing (not sure why -- genetics?) and became profoundly deaf. I then had to quickly become GOOD at lipreading. Not an easy thing to do.

I somehow made it though regular, mainstream school, from K through 10th grade with nothing more than lipreading and copying my friend's class notes on the school copier. Okay, that wasn't really all -- I also had speech teachers from the local oral deaf school/program spend at least an hour during the school day with me. We would work on speech, schoolwork if I needed help understanding concepts, and also social and relationship issues. They weren't just preparing me to speak in the real world, they were helping to prepare for living in the world. I remember most of them with great affection.

November of 11th grade year I got a cochlear implant. This was actually something my parents had encouraged me to get since I was in 7th grade, but I had had no interest in it until suddenly one day I just up and decided I was ready to get it, and completely surprised my parents. In hindsight, I think this was because I realized that I had gotten as good with my speech and listening as I was going to get with my hearing aids, and if I wanted to get even better, I would need to get a cochlear implant.

So I got one. And it was very strange in the beginning, but it did improve my listening and speech. (And the whole story about that is another blog post.)

Back to making it through school -- nothing but lipreading and notes until 10th grade, then for 11th and 12th grade my parents paid for Real Time Captioning (RTC) just for my honors English class as I would get completely lost with the constant classroom discussions. (RTC is just what a court reporter does, but it is translated into longhand onto a laptop in front of the deaf person/me in real-time.) (We tried to get the school district to pay for it. Their argument was that in order for them to pay for RTC, I would need to be taking regular English AND failing. Jerks.)

I went to college and my parents strongly advocated for the university providing RTC services for me. (I was so lucky -- they kept the background dealings from me so I could just enjoy college.) I had a Ms. Somebody for the first semester or two who did the RTC. Then the university realized how expensive that was and found someone else to do it for less money. Fine. Then I think after my sophomore year, they really realized how expensive it was overall and told my parents "the next two years we will only pay for RTC for 2 out of the 3 classes that she takes." (They were already lucky because most students took 4 full classes a term, while I only took 3, with some half-credit classes added in that didn't require RTC.) My parents response? "Of the 3 classes that she takes, gather the 3 professors together and they amongst themselves can decide which of their classes she will only understand half of." My parents won.

Need to type up another post about my cochlear implant experiences!