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Feedback, A Look At Living With Hearing Aids

Squuuuuuuuuuueeeeeeek! No, this isn't the part of my site where you tell me what you thought of the site:) This is my page on being hard of hearing.( In case you didn't know, feedback is the noise that a hearing aid makes. You wouldn't believe how many people don't know that.) So, welcome.If you were expecting a guestbook, hit the back button on your browser, and click on the guestbook icon on the main page.


I was born with no ear canals. Well I do have them, but medicaly speaking they don't exist. They're just really really really tiny. That just means an earwig can't crawl into my ear canal, I can't do the arrow though the head trick convincingly, and my doctors can't look in my ear with that otoscope thingy. They have to resort to a CAT scan.lol Well I got off easy. At least I have ears.Most of the time with this type of patholgy there are no outer ears, or the outer ears are malformed. As a result I have low-frequecy hearing loss. My voice is very..... shall we say unique. I have been accused of having a British accent. [I am American I AM British on my dad's side. Maybe it's in the genes:) lol]I wore hearing aids from the time I was 3 til the day after my 17th birthday due to surgery. I had a love/hate relationship with my hearing aids when I was little. I didn't really mind wearing them. After all some people had to wear glasses. I had to wear hearing aids. On the other hand kids in a Stepford suburb didn't see it that way. They made fun of my voice. At least I could (literly) turn them off. Incidently I never understood why kids on TV sitcoms always worried about getting glasses and braces. Everyone wore glasses and braces. However I was the only one who had to wear hearing aids. That changed the day after I turned 17. I had surgery at Mass. Eye and Ear on my left ear. Believe it or not my hearing ALSO came back in my right ear for about 2 months. However then my hearing started going downhill and I became very depressed. I am going to post an essay I wrote about my surgery over at Geocities when I find the time. I went through my final year of high school without a hearing aid, making honor roll for the first time ever in my academic career. My first year of college I got a new hearing aid. I had to go through about 3 weeks at college without one. I used an auditory tranier [you don't want to know. It's a deaf kid's worst nightmare]in class for those 3 weeks until it came. Those were a LOOOONG 3 weeks. At least I had some hearing and I can speechread, so I wasn't that bad off. No, despite what I may have led you to think I can hear without a hearing aid. I am not completly deaf. I am more like someone who has to wear glasses then someone who's legally blind. My audiologists all say becuase of my surgery I only have to wear hearing aids sometimes. Speaking of audiologists I had to go to one the other day. My hearing aid broke. I cannot believe how easily they break. You drop one 2 inches and it smashes open. They should design a hearing aid made out of the stuff that they make black boxes out of. I am also getting a new one! It's an in the ear one. I thought I was getting an over the ear one for my right ear becuase of the patholgy.Back in high school I discovered that over the ears are more powerful then in the ears. Kinda strange don't you think? I mean we're told that small techno stuff is just as powerful as the big versions. Apparently the in the ears are just loud enough for minor league deafness but don't really affect how a person with moderate deafness hears. I wish I'd known that BEFORE high school. I wouldn't have needed a translator. I really wish I was a little kid again. They now have these really cool over the ear hearing aids in different colors. When I was little all they had was boring brown. Let me guess, I'll have surgery and THIS time it will work, but for some reason hearing aids will become a must-have fashion accessory. Actually it's already started. I went to a REM concert a few years ago where Michal Stipe wore a hearing aid, and Bill Clinton has one too. [ could pretend it's not working the next time someone asks him if he had an affair with someone] I can just picture little teeny bopper girls asking each other if their hearing aids look good. Well I always seem to sway the masses in terms of what's popular[Iwas into leopard/tiger skin before it showed up at Urban Outfitters, and I loved hot stuff before all those hot n' spicy food products came on the market]Let's see if I can't help make hearing aids cool!

Links to Pages About Deafness

Galludet University's magazine targeted towards deaf/hard of hearing youth
Deaf World Web
Deaf Information Exchange
Deaf Zone

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