The Tao of Deafness

In my opinion, it helps everybody if we try to be aware of other people´s position and their priorities: to sense and feel where they´re coming from. Stephen Covey says in his ´Seven Habits of Highly Effective People´ that in order to be understood we must first seek to understand the other. So, if I want to be understood as a person who has Profound Unilateral Hearing Loss, I must first seek to understand those who do not have it. This is fairly easy for me to do because I used to have normal hearing but it is much harder for those who have never directly experienced PUHL to fully appreciate what living with a hearing loss is like. So the hope must be that when I try to see other people´s point of view, that perhaps by some process of synergy, an understanding of my reality will arise in them. I cannot expect a carbon copy type of understanding but what I am likely to get is good enough.

It seems to me that it is always a good idea to prepare ahead of time and wherever possible to offer others some friendly information that could give some idea of the special needs we may have as deaf people. Such prior preparation and communication helps avoid those unpleasant situations where hearing people can feel as if they have been taken by surprise when a situation just lands in on them and they are forced to make some kind of snap decision by way of a response. Some deaf people might regard this suggestion of mine as demeaning or something they ought not be obliged to do, and regard it as tending toward overkill and, of course, they may be right so far as it goes but, I say again, it is only my personal opinion and may not be to everybody´s satisfaction as a way of going about things. It has simply seemed to me over the years that it is a pretty unremarkable thing for me, for example, to make a wee bit of effort and try to get to know the neighbours and the local shopkeepers at the time when I was moving to a new house in a new area of town. At least that way the ecounters are made at a time of my choosing and when the prevailing circumstances seem to suit me. As another example, when I got my hearing dog I decided to nip in and say to the guy at the local chippy, hey, I have a hearing dog and is it okay with you if from time to time I bring him in with me?. Usually, people are fine about it and I can always get the extra favour of staff remembering me and taking the trouble to let me know when it is my turn in the queue: for me, that relieves a lot of stress! I ought to mention that Assistance Dogs are legally entitled to accompany their owners to restaurants and such like, so I am not suggestign that favours be asked for, merely that it is better to do things timeously and coopeatively.

Naturally, and unavoidably there are going to be those emergency situations that simply must be dealt with the best way possible at the time and I have heard the horror stories of atavistic individuals leaving vulnerable people in the lurch and refusing to help them claiming it is ´not their job´. Well some people are cussed in the workplace and at home or anywhere else so it shouldn´t surprise us too much if that cussedness extends to their encounters with people with disabilities too. Expecting somebody who is habitually nasty with his wife and children and work colleagues to be untypically civil to people with disabilities is unrealistic and why we have laws to protect us from them. On the other hand, I come across many otherwise sophisticated people who treat me with disdain and suspicion simply because they cannot understand where I am coming from and they get upset at being deprived of their stereotype of failure which they would much prefer to see me exhibit if only because it would be easier for them to deal with. How sad for them. On one occasion I protested over the phone that I could not deal with being interrupted and could she please not talk over me. But I don´t like being interrupted either she replied. I explained that before my deafness I had not wanted people to interrupt me either but now, unlike her, it was no longer a question of what I wanted but what I needed.

I must admit it was a long time before I was able to carry out my own advice. I always wanted to do it but never quite knew how to do it, in practical terms. I remember asking a nurse in hospital just after my hearing loss what it was going to be like (and in so doing over-estimating her professional abilties such that I was asking the poor woman to demonstrate God like powers!) but she wisely replied that it was a bit like a life after death question - nobody had been there and came back to report their experience. So I suppose what I am about to share with you does not seem very much but I must say that it was a great discovery for me when I realised I could say to people who were not doctors or professionals what the problem with my hearing was. That great discovery, that ´magical phrase´ was simply to say to people that my hearing comes and goes! Of course, this is not strictly or technically accurate, but it has proved very useful for me as a way to quickly tell people what my situation is succinctly without taking up their valuable time if, for example, they may been in a hurry and just not have the time to listen to a lengthy explanation. I hope this is useful to others, so I will repeat it again: "Profound Unilateral Hearing Loss — my hearing comes and goes".   By always trying first to understand the other in order for ourselves and our hearing loss to be understood, it is easy to imagine why hearing people will be puzzled as to why one might, for example, say good morning to them one day and then seem to ignore that same person a day or two later. Worse still when it is noted that one is not totally deaf because, after all, we might have been caught saying goodbye to our wives or children or demontrating in some other way an ability to hear. So, in fairness, people need a credible but brief explanation as to why these pesky things - when they happen - are not intened to be hurtful or offensive, they are simply part of a hearing problem that is very hard for most people, even professionals, to fully comprehend.

It is really encouraging for me to see that Web Designers are making huge moves to accommodate rights of access and accessibility for people with disabilities using the internet. Feedback is always welcomed by them and I know it is a source of frustration for many of them when users don´t upgrade their browsers to the most recent versions and thus make the web designer´s job that much harder. than it needs to be. Please upgrade your browser!

Rather than concentrate on the disability a balance can be found if we try to enable others. To think that we (as people with certain disabilities) can enable able-bodied people to do bigger and better things is a wonderful thing in my opinion and it can be done by sharing the skills we have as specialist internet users and specialist dog owners with our marvellous hearing dogs, and such like. There so many common misapprehensions about dogs and animals in general that there is a much needed job to do by making people more aware. A smile says more than any complaint - and it´s great if we can see the funny side of disability and there are some great books on the subject that are amazing. This article which I have called The Tao of Deafness draws on the writings of Chuang Tzu and from Lao Tzu´s Tao Te Ching and I know I have gained a lot from own experience of reading these texts and I sometimes wonder if people engage in extreme sports so that they can have some of the benefits of the challenges that people with disabilities experience and benefit from. If so, is that not an example of people with disabilities enabling and inspiring able bodied people to achieve bigger and better things?

Short Term Memory Loss

Let me try to describe what it is like living with STML (short term memory loss). These things seldom come alone and in my case it was the consequence of a head injury when I was young. I became deaf on the right side due to a ruptured cochlea which, in turn, badly affected my balance in terms of my ability to walk (or even stand still). I remember being asked to stand on one leg and falling over and perhaps also touching my nose at the same time (but I don’t quite remember now). In any event, I mention these things because I have to say that ever since the age of twenty eight I have felt I am living the life of an old man. Now that I am fifty five I feel more at home with my limitations (having got used to them) and they seem less incongruous to me as a fifty five year old than as a young man. Falling over when putting on my pyjamas at night et cetera, now seems almost a normal thing to do! Similarly, losing spectacles, going into bath/shower with wristwatch still on, et cetera!

What will never be normal however is venturing out of doors having forgotten to tidy up one’s flyes or be in some other form of undress ( a constant worry for me). I grew a moustache and have stubble to avoid the embarrassment of being known as a person who is always clean-shaven , only to go out on some dread occasion having forgotten to shave first. Doing things repeatedly – like boiling a kettle, or making a cuppa tea and forgetting when it was made, and being unsure in general whether one has already done something or not is also very annoying. Throwing things in the bin that one ought not to, is also very annoying.

I have virtually no conception of time and I hide it by use of non specific words like “recently” or “the other day”. By contrast, I think I have fairly good long term memory but, that said, I reckon I must have – I think it was probably my strong long term memory which “pulled me out” of my head injury aftermath and allowed me to make a recovery. I had been a musician once when I was very young and I always had a memory somewhere in the back of my mind of my fingers trying to play a particular tune I had learnt.

If my wife phones and asks me to do something I have to make sure it is repeated the last thing before the call ends and that I do it immediately when the call ends because if I leave it for any time then it is pretty much guaranteed I will forget it. Complex or involved jobs must be done strictly one at a time, serial fashion, and with a certain rhythm either of movement or sequence of things to do. For example, I am fine with words rolling out in a sequence like a narrative line but my memory “freezes” if I am asked to answer something in isolation and unexpectedly (such as in a quiz). My recall has actually improved recently, I am pleased to say: if my train of thought is broken I can sometimes recover from where I had left off. Ordinarily, most of my thinking is carried out “monorail” fashion – although I am tenacious in my thinking (I like debugging/modifying computer programs) I find it hard to change direction of thought “mid-flow” or to be uniquely “creative”. I like games like chess and I enjoy programming a computer.

In normal conversation, most of the time, I start off by answering somebody’s question by getting as far as the introductory remarks by which time I have completely forgotten there is an answer required to be given! I never put on a kettle or turn on the cooker (especially the grill which I have nearly set the house on fire with many times) with out telling a family member first of all in case I forget. I never run a bath without telling a family member first either because I have come close to flooding there house many times. So there is a connection there between language and action to the extent that there is a disjoint between "what I start" and "what I finish" (or, more accurately, "don't finish").

So all that means I have coping strategy of doing many things swiftly! Do I get praise and admiration from the medical establishment for my recover? Nope - what I do get is a diagnosis of manic depression which ensures I have been unemployed (just like an old guy) for most of my working[sic] life.

Hard for people to believe perhaps but it is very difficult if not impossible to tell lies with STML! Okay, perhaps with sufficient effort it could be done but it would need a lot of effort. I describe this by pointing to the bubble sort algorithm that shows that two variables cannot have their values swapped without one of them being destroyed. The problem is resolved by introducing a temporary storage variable (i.e. memory). So if the totality of one's memory is committed to honest survival then there is no possibility of the luxury of "pare" memory locations acting as temporary placeholders for one to return to after the lie has been told and it is necessary to return to "the real world"

Analogous to that inability to "overwork" is the fact that I used to be a very happy go lucky person who was always smiling. I noticed that I had lost that aspect of my personality and I out it down to my getting older until I realised it was in reality due to overload put upon me by the outside world and I was so challenged by the effort that I had to dig into my deeper personal resources: I hope I can recover the ability before too long.

More mundanely, I depend on my hearing dog who is trained to respond to a timer for me and he reminds me of things I might otherwise forget. The routine of looking after him helps as I must exercise and feed him regularly. A problem I noticed was forgetting how many times I had already fed him until I hit upon the idea of positioning his dish in different ways according to the meal he had just has so I was/am able to keep track of it now.

click here to contact me by email