Defining Disability

Katherine Bouton Healthy Hearing , ,

Do I have a disability?

It depends on when you ask.

If I am alone at home with no noise except my breathing and quiet tapping on the computer keyboard, and I’m wearing my hearing aid and cochlear implant, then No, I don’t. Or at least I don’t perceive the disability. If the phone rings and the captioning service works, then No, I don’t. If I join a Zoom meeting that’s captioned, No, I don’t. If I’m watching TV with captions, No, I don’t.

TV Captions

That doesn’t make me a person without a disability. It just makes me feel like one.

Under the ADA, there’s no question about my status. “An individual with a disability is defined by the ADA as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.”

The accommodations I describe  – a quiet home, hearing aid and cochlear implant, captions on my phone, captioned Zoom meetings and TV – alleviate the hearing deficit to the point that I forget I have it. And that’s what we aim to do when we advocate for accommodations in the outside world.

These accommodations allow me to participate in the ADA’s “major life activities.” But not entirely, and this is why I am a person with a disability. With hearing loss as severe as mine, accommodations don’t cure or reverse the disability. They lessen the struggle. They mitigate it. But they don’t make it go away.

For those with less severe hearing loss, which is the vast majority of people who self-identify as having hearing difficulties, accommodations don’t just alleviate but may eliminate the disability. If you have mild to moderate hearing loss, you might have trouble hearing in a restaurant. Accommodations in a restaurant can be something as simple as a corner table, carpeting, acoustic tiles or other noise absorbers, tables spaced farther apart. We don’t think of them as accommodations but they are. They make a built environment compatible for people who might otherwise not be able to participate. In this case accommodations don’t just alleviate the disability, they may make it disappear.

Sometimes accommodations aggravate the disability. I’d put movie-theater cupholder captioning screens in this category. They are so awkward to use, and so often mistakenly programmed, that they simply remind me that I can’t hear the movie. If all movies had open captions along the bottom of the screen, that would be an accommodation that would allow me to forget my disability.

Do I have a disability? Yes.

Am I disabled? No, because accommodations allow me to function. Without accommodations I would be disabled – I AM disabled. But only temporarily.

The “people first” preference for disabilities is correct not only in the sense we usually use it – I am a person first, and my disability is a part of me. But it is also correct because this disability I have isn’t always disabling. So it shouldn’t define me.

I welcome comments on accommodations that make you forget you have a disability, as well as accommodations that just make it harder.

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For more about living with hearing loss, read my books at Amazon.com.Smart Hearing is a guide to everything about hearing loss. Shouting Won’t Help is my personal story of loss and renewal. Both are available in paperback and on Kindle. Available only at Amazon.com unless you can persuade your local bookstore to order one for you.

When Seeing is Hearing

Katherine Bouton Hearing Loss ,

Isolation isn’t conducive to writing about communication difficulties. Since communication difficulties are what this blog is about, I haven’t written much in recent months.

I’m getting along just fine with no one to talk to. I’m hearing well. Or at least I feel like I’m hearing well. But that’s because everything I hear – the television, the telephone, Zoom calls – is captioned. When I can see the words, I can also hear them.

That seeing enhances hearing is a well known phenomenon, which I’ve written about in the past. Researchers call it the McGurk effect, named after one of the British scientists who discovered in the 1970s that people comprehend speech better if they also see it. They called it “hearing lips and seeing voices.”

This is why good communication strategies are important. It’s why we need to make sure we can see a speaker in order to hear them. We all intuitively speech read. The speaker’s facial expressions contribute to our comprehension.  How the words are formed in the mouth and on the lips is also important, which is why we used to call it lipreading. Now we know that lipreading is augmented by facial expression and body language, and we call it speechreading.

I’m a good speechreader, but only if I can also hear what’s being said. If I hit the trifecta — hear the speaker, see the speaker, AND get captions — I hear perfectly! Fortunately for me, that’s often the case with virtual meetings and conversations.

There are times when captions fail me, however, especially with live TV. I like to watch the network news to catch up on the day. One network, my favorite, has terrible captioning. The captions routinely start stuttering, the same few words repeated over and over again while the speakers cluelessly move on. Eventually I give up and change the channel. Readers if you also have this experience, is it worse on a particular network? I’m reluctant to slam mine, but feel free chime in.

This network is presumably using ASR — Automatic Speech Recognition. Unfortunately the network’s system can’t even recognize the names of the network’s star correspondents. Far superior is CART captioning — Communication Access Real Time Translation. It would seem well worth the small investment in a good CART captioner. Networks, listen up! increase your viewership. The same problem exists, by the way, with live sports captioning.

Maybe I AM hearing better. Without the anxiety and stress of trying to hear and understand all day — trying to communicate — I’m more relaxed. These past few months, as bad as they’ve been, have for me included one benefit, a big benefit. I can hear.

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Here is a link for filing a complaint to the FCC. You will not be able to complain about a recurring problem, just one specific station/show on one specific date. So if you are trying to watch NBC Nightly News, for instance, you will have to choose one specific date and time to complain about.

A Question About Sound

Katherine Bouton Healthy Hearing

If a tree falls and I’m not wearing my hearing aids, does it make a sound?

One morning last week I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee when I noticed something odd out the window. We have a large, old, beautiful and very decrepit barn. From where I was sitting, a tree trunk seemed to be leaning on it. It’s a woodsy overgrown area, so at first I thought I just hadn’t noticed it before.

Later I went out to look more closely and saw that the tree trunk had pierced the barn roof, leaving a hole about six by eight feet, now filled with tree trunk. Not only that, as the tree man told me later (see photo), the trunk had snapped off, hit the sloping ground, and then flipped back up, like an Olympic pole vaulter. I’m sorry I missed it!

Downed tree, left, leans into barn.

But I’m more concerned that I didn’t hear it. It must have made a loud noise as the trunk cracked and fell and an even louder noise as it sank into the roof. It was a windless night, and quiet.

I have a dog who barks at people coming to the door and at stray raccoons and other creatures who venture too close to the house. But the cracking tree doesn’t seem to have phased him. Maybe because it was one (or two) short sharp sounds. That may be why I didn’t hear it either. I have some residual hearing, though, and it dismays me that I could miss something so dramatic.

But back to the question. It’s a play on the old philosophy trope, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” An amusing essay in Medium by John Hydrisko attributes it (or the idea of it) to George Berkeley, an 18th century Irish philosopher whose belief was summed up in the phrase: esse est percipi (aut percipere); to be is to be perceived (or to perceive). For Berkeley, Hydrisko writes, if the tree is not perceived it doesn’t exist. “If you asked George Berkeley, ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it? — he would probably cut you off, “What tree?’” No one there to perceive it. Thus it doesn’t exist.

The Oxford English dictionary defines “sound” as “Vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear.” But if they reach the ear and are not heard, are they still sound?

Scientific American, back in the 18thcentury (thank you again John Hydrisko), summed it up: “Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.”

Of course there were ears to hear: all the little critters in the forest have some form of hearing, and in many cases it’s far more acute than ours. So, If a tree falls and I’m not wearing my hearing aids, does it make a sound? Ask the deer and the raccoons and mice. The answer is yes.

Katherine Bouton is the author of “Shouting: Won’t Help: Why I and 50 Million Other Americans Can’t Hear You” and “Smart Hearing: Strategies, Skills and Resources for Living Better With Hearing Loss.” Both are available in paperback or as an ebook through Amazon.com

What the ADA Means to Me

Katherine Bouton #HLAA., Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), CART captioning, Hearing Loss Association of America

30 years ago this week, George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, which had been passed by a bipartisan Congress. Change for people with visible disabilities came quickly. Curb cuts became the norm, and allowed people in wheelchairs to cross the street. Wheelchair ramps aided not just wheelchair users but people with strollers or walkers. Braille became standard on public signage. Every governor and mayor had an ASL interpreter at his or her side when speaking in public.

Less easily or quickly addressed was the invisible disability of hearing loss. It is thanks to Rocky Stone, the founder of the Hearing Loss Association of America (then called SHHH), that hearing loss was included in the list of disabilities covered. One essential accommodation — in my opinion the most important for people with hearing loss — was the development of CART captioning. This photo shows one of my early experiences with it, speaking to a hearing-loss group.

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CART captioning.

On the 20th anniversary of the ADA, ten long years ago, I had recently quit my much loved job as an editor at The New York Times. I couldn’t hear well enough to manage the many meetings and phone calls and other requirements of the job. I could have asked to be transferred to a position which would not have required so much public and workplace interaction, but I was worn out from many years of trying to keep up. The obstacles seemed insurmountable. The technology was not very good.

Today, ten years later, the accommodations that would have made the workplace accessible to me exist, and I would have had the confidence and determination to ask for them and to use them.

I would have asked for CART captioning in all company-wide meetings. I would have asked for a conference room in our department to be looped, and for my department’s meetings to be held in that room. I would have asked for looping for the larger conference room, where Page One and other meetings were held. I would have asked for a captioned telephone. I would have used my own smart phone for calls, using the captioning app Innocaption+. I would have used speech to text captioning in smaller groups: Otter for the iPhone, Google Transcribe for an Android. I would have asked people – probably over and over and over again – to look at me when they speak, not to talk over each other, to repeat key phrases if I miss them or to paraphrase them.

Other benefits for people with hearing loss that stem from the passage of the ADA involve FCC requirements for cell phones and landlines to be compatible with hearing aids. Movies are captioned (usually via a device you ask for at the theater), television is captioned. The governor or mayor will include a CART captioner as well as the ASL interpreter for public events. Hearing loops allow people to hear in public spaces simply by changing the program on a hearing aid. This is really just a smidgen of the changes that have come about. Readers, please suggest others that have been meaningful to you.

In my term as president of the New York City chapter of HLAA, I was part of groups advocating for accommodations in the public and private spectrum. One of my proudest moments was the signing in 2016 of two bills by Mayor Bill De Blasio that advanced accommodations for people with disabilities. These in fact served people with hearing loss but also all New Yorkers, as many accommodations do. The first required all city agencies to have a disability-services facilitator on staff and to publicize the name of the person and contact information. The second required that meetings and other events must include information about accessibility on the announcement or invitation. (Prior to this bill, a person with hearing loss might go to an event that had been advertised as hearing accessible and find only an ASL interpreter.)

The picture shows some of the people who made those changes happen.

K, R, G, Helen and the Mayor 2015.03.14-ADA-Bill-Signing-Alatriste
Left to right, Katherine Bouton, HLAA member and advocate Ruth Bernstein, Co-sponsor of the bills City Council Member Helen Rosenthal, HLAA member and advocate Jerry Bergman, Mayor Bill De Blasio. (I can’t identify the  two men in the background.)

 

The following year the mayor signed a another bill, requiring installation of hearing loops in all new or renovated city buildings with a base cost of $1 million. And shortly after that, the historic landmarked City Council Chamber in City Hall was looped.

The fight for accommodations is in no way over, but it’s being waged. The pandemic has revealed the essential need for transparent masks in medical settings. Another of our chapter members, Toni Iacolucci, is working with New York City’s massive hospital system to make hearing accommodation available.

In 2016, at the New York Yankees’ annual Disability Awareness Night, our chapter received an award from the Mayor for our contributions to a more accessible New York.

yankee game copy
Left to right, Katherine with the citation, Toni Iacolucci, Deputy Commissioner for People with Disabilities Kleo King, Commissioner Victor Calise.

We have a long way to go in getting full accommodation for people with hearing loss. But the ADA gives us the legal means to continue our fight. Perhaps as important, the ADA has raised awareness of discrimination against people with disabilities and their rights for equal accommodation. Let’s hope by the 40th anniversary we won’t have to be working so hard to provide access to all people, no matter how severe their disability is, or how invisible it is. Thanks to HLAA for leading the way.

Heroes with Hearing Loss

Katherine Bouton #HLAA., Heroes With Hearing Loss, Veterans with hearing loss

This Memorial Day, there will be very few parades to celebrate our veterans. But it’s a good time to remind ourselves of the toll that war takes on hearing.

flag of america
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Pexels.com

When we think about the injuries our servicemen and -women endure, we focus on major life-changing injuries like Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We worry about suicide in veterans. We see veterans struggling to learn to walk again with prosthetic limbs or learning to hug a child using a prosthetic arm. These are all horrifying consequences of war and no one would minimize them.

But there is a war wound we don’t see, and for the most part don’t think about. Hearing loss and tinnitus are the two largest categories of disability in the military, and have been for some time.

These are not comparable injuries in terms of the scale of destruction, and they are not life-threatening. They are often secondary to TBI or other debilitating injuries. But they’re permanent. And long after a veteran has begun to recover from these other wounds physically and emotionally, he (or she) begins to realize the hearing loss or tinnitus is not going away.

Hearing loss is even more an invisible disability in the military than it is elsewhere, but it is intertwined with other injuries both physically and emotionally — “as a trigger, a constant reminder or an everyday frustration. It is a very unique and personal challenge for many veterans,” one veteran told an audience at the Hearing Loss Association of America‘s (HLAA) annual convention in 2014 in a presentation by Heroes with Hearing Loss, who speak to veterans’ groups and others about the impact of hearing loss and tinnitus. I wrote about their 2014 presentation in “An Invisible War Wound,” published on November 11th, 2014, Veterans’ Day. (This post is an adaptation.)

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HLAA was founded in 1979 by Rocky Stone, who also suffered service-related hearing loss. It continues to honor and offer resources for veterans, on both the national and chapter level. Donald Doherty, a retired Marine and Vietnam veteran, is a former Chair of the Board of Directors of HLAA. He lost his hearing as a result of gunfire and artillery noise during a 1965-66 tour in Vietnam and has worn hearing aids since June 1970.  During his tenure as board chair, he established a virtual veterans chapter of HLAA, which offers many services to veterans. Here’s a link to the HLAA page. 

Doherty offers another explanation for the invisibility of hearing loss among veterans. “Marines — and anyone in the armed forces — have been instilled with a sense of pride, the need to act independently, to do it yourself. It’s a sign of weakness if you reach out for help,” he said. Eventually, he said, you realize it’s affecting “not only yourself but everyone around you.” Heroes with Hearing Loss helps veterans accept help.  If you’d like to read more about the Heroes with Hearing Loss presentation at HLAA, here’s a link to my earlier post, The Noise of War.

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For more about living with hearing loss, read my books at Amazon.com.

Smart Hearing is a guide to everything about hearing loss. Shouting Won’t Help is my personal story of loss and renewal. Both are available in paperback and on Kindle. Available only at Amazon.com unless you can persuade your local bookstore to order one for you.

 

 

 

 

Are Your Hearing Aids Surviving Social Distancing?

Katherine Bouton #hearingaids ,

Mine are getting a workout. And the batteries are showing it.

I have an Oticon Made for iPhone hearing aid, which means that whatever I hear via the phone is channeled by Bluetooth to my hearing aid. This is wonderful!

I can hear phone conversations, I can listen to podcasts, I can watch and hear online classes, I can watch a YouTube video with sound. Recorded books go through the Bluetooth to my hearing aid. So does the audio of a meditation app, like Calm.

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It’s spring! Can you hear the birds?

I also use the phone and bluetooth when I am following an online exercise class. I use my laptop for visuals and phone for audibles. I connect to the class on both devices and then press “play” on both simultaneously. That way the video is on my laptop, the audio is in my ear.

The main problem is that all this use drains the battery at a significantly faster rate than a hearing aid battery without using Bluetooth. This is true with standard disposable batteries as well as rechargeable ones. Here’s a fairly technical discussion of battery capacity with both disposable and rechargeable batteries.

I actually have only one hearing aid, and it’s doing all the work. I have a cochlear implant in my other ear, so if I wanted to connect directly to the implant as well I’d need to stream through a second device like a Roger Pen. If anyone has tried this, I’d love to hear if it works. Do the two assistive devices sync properly? The four steps it would take to sign on to yoga class on both phone and laptop, using both Roger and Oticon bluetooth, does seem a little absurd. One ear is fine.

I also have a clip-on mini mike, useful for a socially distanced conversation with a masked person on a park bench, and this also drains the battery. I just ordered a ten-pack of batteries.

The hearing aid itself is suffering wear and tear for other reasons.

I always wear a mask when I go out, which is frequently  — because I live in an apartment (no back yard) and I have a dog. Dogs need to go out at least a couple of times a day. The mask loops fit over my ears. Unfortunately it’s already crowded behind my ears, with my hearing aid earpiece in one and c.i. earpiece in the other. I also wear glasses, which take up even more behind-the-ear space. The mask tends to dislodge the c.i. earpiece, so I have to wear a hat or a wide headband to keep it in place. Somehow the hearing aid manages to get tangled in the mask.

The second damaging element is dirt. I make sure the wax guards are clean but the vent – a tiny duct that lets in just enough air to make the aid more comfortable – is clogged with wax. I can’t remember how I used to keep it clean but now the audiologist says the only solution is denture floss. She’s mailing me some. If were able to go into her office, she told me, she could vacuum it out. I wonder if I can get a special hearing-aid attachment for my Electrolux.

I wasn’t sure how to reach the audiologist but I finally emailed her. It turns out she can do much of her work through telemedicine. And good news from the CMS: Medicare and Medicaid will now cover any tele-audiology visits that would ordinarily be covered by an office visit. I’ll write about this when I know more about how it works.

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For more about living with hearing loss, read my books at Amazon.com.

Smart Hearing is a guide to everything about hearing loss. Shouting Won’t Help is my personal story of loss and renewal. Both are available in paperback and on Kindle. Available only at Amazon.com unless you can persuade your local bookstore to order one for you.

Communicating in the Age of Covid: An Unexpected Benefit

Katherine Bouton #HLAA., Captions for hearing loss, CART captioning, HLAA Webinars, speechreading

There aren’t many bright spots when it comes to Covid 19. The death toll is enormous, the financial impact is potentially catastrophic, the fear of what lies ahead can be overwhelming. Still, for many with hearing loss, this period offers an insight into what it’s like to have equal access to spoken communication.

Many of us “manage” our hearing loss as best we can, through hearing aids and cochlear implants, through assistive listening devices, through speech reading and attention to communication strategies. I have a cochlear implant and a hearing aid. As grateful as I am for their superior technology, they’re not enough for me to participate fully in the hearing world. I employ these various devices and strategies with somewhat limited success.

KB celebrity. MiguelEdwards-48
Giving a reading in Seattle. Behind me you can see CART captions projected on a screen.

But in the age of Covid, the playing field has been leveled. It is often said that we hear with our brains. It’s equally true that we hear with our eyes.

As an advocate for people with hearing loss, I attend a lot of meetings. Most have to do with disability access and most offer live CART captions as well as accommodations for other disabilities. I’m able to keep up fairly well, although the effort of reading captions during an in-person meeting gets exhausting.

These days, however, all our meetings are virtual, and many of them are captioned. See below for instructions for getting captions.  With a Zoom meeting or Google Meet or any other captioned forum, an extra element is added that makes all the difference for me. These apps allow the speaker’s face to be isolated on the screen. (Click on the icon on the upper right of the app’s screen and then choose “Speaker View.”) That means that in addition to hearing the voice and reading the captions it’s very easy to read lips as well.

A good CART captioner makes the captions seem to synchronize with the spoken word. With my ears alone (plus hearing aid and cochlear implant) I miss a lot. With CART captions, the speaker’s voice actually sounds clearer and easier to understand. Am I hearing the words or am I reading them? I often can’t tell.

Add the visual element of the speaker facing you on the screen, and you’ve got triple input. Researchers call this multiple the McGurk effect, named after one of the British scientists who discovered in the 1970s that people comprehend speech better if they hear it in multiple ways. The scientists called it “hearing lips and seeing voices.” That’s why we need to see the speaker’s face clearly. A friend of mine likes to say, “Don’t speak till you see the whites of my eyes.” That is, she needs to see your lips in order to hear your voice. Adding captions to eyes and ears is an important third element. In a live gathering, adding hearing assistance in the form of a hearing loop is another way of improving the hearing experience through multiple inputs.

FaceTime also turns out to be an invaluable tool, although it doesn’t use captions. I always thought FaceTime was basically for fun, for talking to your grandkids or your boyfriend. But the McGurk effect applies here too. FaceTime isolates the speaker’s face close up.  This vastly enhances the ability to speech read. So, just as with good CART captioning, if I’m on a FaceTime call, I’m not sure if I’m hearing the speaker or reading lips. The input from eyes and ears are inextricably entwined.

In this time of social distancing, masks, self-quarantine, living apart from one another – we may feel isolated. I did at first, and I wrote about it in my column Coronavirus Concerns for People with Hearing Loss. It’s not just the disease. (As we learned more, I updated that column: I Take It All Back.)

But as I’ve become more comfortable with technology, everything’s changed. Eyes, ears and brain working in sync make me feel more connected than ever.

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To access Zoom captions: The person who initiates the meeting can either hire a CART operator to provide live captioning or can offer automatic voice recognition captions (which are generally less accurate). You, the guest at the meeting, click on “Closed Captions” on the very bottom of the Zoom screen. The captions will run just above that. You can adjust the caption size by clicking on CC and scrolling down. Sometimes “chat” interferes with the captions. If that’s happening, click on “chat” and the box with chat messages will appear on the right. You can move your whole screen to the right to get them out of sight. I know this sounds complicated but once you try it, it gets easier.

For more on the kinds of technology that are useful for people with hearing loss, especially now, the websites of both the Hearing Loss Association of America and the Center for Hearing and Communication offer good tutorials, including webinars.

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For more about living with hearing loss, read my books, available at Amazon.com and maybe at your favorite bookstore or library. If they’re not there, ask for them.

Here’s a link to my most recent book: Smart Hearing: Strategies, Skills and Resources for Living Better with Hearing Loss. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gratitude

Katherine Bouton Coronavirus, Healthy Hearing, HLAA Webinars, Michael Harvey

I have my curmudgeonly side and I don’t always like being told to see the bright side of things. I enjoy a good wallow in misery. But the misery of the Covid pandemic is sustained and severe. We share funny things to lighten the day – jokes, cartoons, animal videos, kids doing kid things. We watch streaming performances of uplifting cultural events like opera and theater. We go on virtual museum tours. We listen to live streaming of religious services, particularly in this past week when many were celebrating Passover or Easter week.

Last week the Hearing Loss Association of America, #HLAA, offered a free webinar with Michael Harvey, a clinical psychologist in Framingham, Mass. and the author of  Listen with the Heart: Relationships and Hearing Loss and The Odyssey of Hearing Loss: Tales of Triumph.

thank you signage
Photo by Giftpundits.com on Pexels.com

Dr. Harvey’s talk, titled “Coping with the Coronavirus (Part 2)”, was an interactive seminar on what ” Covid 19 has to Offer Beyond Hardship and Fear.” He began by discussing how some wise people like Nelson Mandela dealt with isolation. He quoted a veteran of the Bataan death march. And he also quoted some of the comments from listeners to Part 1, many of whom had their own wise observations to make.

Much of what we in the hearing loss community have focused on are the disadvantages specific to people with hearing loss: of isolation, of the difficulty of understanding people wearing masks, and so on. Dr. Harvey focused on the positives.

What Dr. Harvey was talking about, however, was a little different. He was asking us to see actual benefits from the experience of living through this pandemic. Some were predictable (though no less valuable for that): more time with family and friends, more time for books and culture. Some mentioned the particular intimacy of video chats and phone calls. One said that – as someone with hearing loss – her (or his) prior experience of isolation was preparation for this more dire isolation: “If the situation becomes more restricting, I’m prepared for it. I’m ahead of the curve.”

I live in New York City and one of the benefits for me is the quiet that has descended on my residential neighborhood. We hear a lot of sirens, but there is no plane or helicopter traffic overhead, very little car noise, not many trucks, no construction. Very few people are out and those who are out are social distancing. So it’s surprisingly peaceful.

At night, at 7 pm, the city opens its windows to cheer for our health care workers with clapping and song and banging pots and pans. In the quiet city, the sound seems to come up out of nowhere. You can’t see many other people, but because there’s no other noise the empty streets and buildings resound with the noise. Many people with hearing loss are sensitive to noise, I know I am. Being in a noisy place is exhausting. But this noise is different.  Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, the Psalm tells us. This is a joyful noise. We’re still here. Thank you, health care workers.

Some are juggling work from home while taking care of young children or supervising the remote-schooling of older kids. Some are taking care of sick or elderly relatives on their own, or worried about finances, or sick with the virus themselves, or grieving losses. And many, of course, are out doing those essential jobs, risking their health for the rest of us. But for many of us, especially people who are older, this is a time without distractions, without the daily activities that used to consume the day: without meetings, commuting, doctors’ appointments, exercising, playing and watching sports, shopping.

“We help ourselves by helping others,” Dr. Harvey said. “If we contribute to the betterment of other people’s lives, it feeds our soul as well.”

We do this by reaching out to friends and family to check on how they are. (Even more so if we reach out to the ones we dread calling for one reason or another.) We do this by sharing our experiences in webinars and Zoom meetings. We do this by observing the rules: by staying indoors, wearing a mask if we have to go out, staying well away from others, washing our hands. One friend of mine made masks by the dozens and distributed them to her neighbors. Others offer to shop for people who can’t go out. Pet adoptions are way up: let’s hope those adopters keep their commitments once the pandemic is over.

And don’t forget the power of a simple thank you. Thank your mail carrier. Thank your garbage collector. Thank the person checking you out at the supermarket. Thank your pharmacist for offering to make a delivery. Thank the bus driver. You can thank them by your actions as well: put your garbage out neatly, clear the junk mail out of your mailbox, have your money ready at the checkout counter so the checker can speed you on your way and shorten his or her own exposure to whatever germs you may be carrying.

If you have other examples of ways we can contribute to the betterment of others’ lives, please share them here. Check out HLAA’s other webinars, including Dr. Harvey’s Coronavirus Part 1.

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For more about living with hearing loss, read my books, available at Amazon.com and maybe at your favorite bookstore or library. If they’re not there, ask for them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coronavirus Got You Stuck at Home? It’s a Good Time to Improve Your Hearing.

Katherine Bouton #HLAA., auditory rehabilitation, Healthy Hearing

Social Isolation can get awfully boring. Many of us find ourselves with not much to do except anxiously watch TV. Here’s a suggestion: make the most of house arrest by tackling one the online auditory rehabilitation programs. virus-4835736_1920-1

Working on hearing better during this period has an added benefit. Since you are probably isolated and not talking to many people, it can help keep the hearing parts of your brain limber.

Essentially, rehab is a way to train your brain to recognize the signals coming via a hearing aid or cochlear implant as specific sounds: rehab focuses on speech sounds primarily, but also helps you to distinguish the sound of banging the lid on a trash can from the bark of a dog or a human shout. Here’s a good explanation from the HLAA website.)

Most of the online programs offer targeted training, like listening to music, as well as basic training that exposes the listener to speech in noise, gradually increasing the ratio of noise to speech. Training can teach you how to focus on one speaker when others are talking, how to retrieve the one word in a sentence you may have missed, how to improve speech-reading, and other general strategies for maximizing your hearing. These are all similar to clinician-based programs, but they are done at home.

After training, scientists can actually see differences in the way the brain responds to trained and untrained sounds, according to Kelly Tremblay, an audiologist and auditory neuroscientist, formerly on the faculty of the University of Washington and a member of the Board of Directors of the Hearing Loss Association of America. In her research, Dr. Tremblay has shown that it doesn’t really matter what specific type of training you do. There is no one-size-fits-all. Even passively listening to sound changes brain activity, including listening to recorded books.

Formal hearing rehabilitation programs are scarce. Fortunately, hearing rehab can be done at home on your own. Quite a few programs can be found online. Most are designed for recipients of cochlear implants, but they can also be useful for new and longtime hearing aid users.

One place to start is with the websites of the three companies licensed in the United States to provide cochlear implants. These programs are free: The Listening Room (Advanced Bionics), Soundscape (Med-El),  The Communication Corner (Cochlear).

Programs independent of the cochlear implant companies include Neurotone’s online LACE (Listening and Communication Enhancement) Listening Program, which was developed by two UCSF audiologists. LACE is available in three increasingly sophisticated levels, with programs for both PC and Mac, as well as DVD. The cost for the program varies but is generally less than $100.

Read My Quips (or RMQ ) is a kind of crossword puzzle. A man and a woman alternately recite lines that take an unexpected twist at the end. You listen as many times as necessary to fill in the crossword blanks. The idea is to be able to understand in louder and louder background noise. An article on the Starkey hearing-aid site is a useful guide to rehab and RMQ: Training the Brain: Hearing Aids and RMQ. (I’m including RMQ in this post because I enjoyed using it in the past, but I have been unable to sign on to their website, so it may no longer be available.)

For further reading, The website for Cochlear Americas also includes an excellent article, Cochlear Implant Rehabilitation: It’s Not Just for Kids! by Donna L. Sorkin and Nancy Caleffe-Schenk.  The Hearing Loss Association of America also offers a guide to listening training programs.

You can also read my 2018 post Learn How to Listen, which discusses some of these same technologies and a few others.

My two previous posts suggested ways for the deaf and hard of hearing to stay in touch  during this period: The first was Coronavirus Concerns for People with Hearing Loss: It’s Not Just the Disease).  The second, written as the pandemic worsened and rules for social isolation quickly changed, was I Take It All Back!

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For more about living with hearing loss, read my books, available at Amazon.com and maybe at your favorite bookstore or library. If they’re not there, ask for them.

 

 

 

 

 

I Take It All Back!

Katherine Bouton Healthy Hearing

 

Well, not all of it. But some of what I said last week — “Coronavirus Concerns for People with Hearing Loss. It’s not just the disease” — is already out of date. This is a very fast-moving story.

 

Resist isolation. Get outside. Take a walk, I said. Wrong.

A week later, it’s clear that’s not a good idea, especially for older people. Unless you live in a private home, to get outside you have to walk through a public space, a lobby perhaps, and maybe take an elevator. The coronavirus lasts a long time on dry surfaces and so just pushing an elevator button or opening a door can expose you. One solution is to wear gloves and make sure that you don’t touch the palms when you take them off. Nitrile or latex disposable gloves are the best, but they are probably in short supply by now. These are single use gloves and your conscience may rebel at the environmental impact. But it’s your life you’re talking about.

     Have a friend for lunch. Wrong.

“One of you is unlikely to infect the other if you both feel well,” I wrote. That was last week. This week we know that anyone can be an invisible and unaware carrier. It’s not worth it if you’re in a high-risk category. Learn to use FaceTime or Skype to keep in touch with family and friends. Here’s a very good article in The Atlantic on the subject.

     Videoconferencing. I was right about this one. 

Video or audio sessions, sometimes over FaceTime or Skype, quickly became the norm for psychotherapists and for anyone who conducts one on one counseling or informational sessions as part of their work. It happened practically overnight. With doctors, it’s called telemedicine. Telemedicine, incidentally, is a technology that is increasingly useful for people with hearing loss who live in areas where there aren’t many audiologists. Hearing aids can be programmed remotely these days. If coronavirus forces us to use telemedicine, it’s probably for the longterm good for hearing-aid users.

     The telephone. This is still a good choice.

But my recommendation to get a captioned landline from Captel or CaptionCall or one of the other companies may have to be put on hold. If you have a smart phone, definitely try Innocaption+. You can download it for free on the App store. The instructions that come with the app are clear and easy to follow. Innocaption+ support is available by email or by phone. I’ve always found them responsive.

     Chat electronically.

You can do this as email or text, or in various chat and message programs. If you’re not comfortable typing, dictate your messages. Just press the microphone icon below or to the left of the keyboard on either Apple or Android message/phone apps. There will be some garble but it’s much easier to go back and correct than it is to type the whole thing.

     Virtual Chapter meetings.

Most HLAA chapter meetings around the country have been canceled for the foreseeable future. HLAA already has a setup for virtual chapters, including one for veterans. Those of us who are #HLAA chapter leaders (I’m the President of the New York City Chapter) should put our heads together and figure out how to have an interactive meeting virtually. I’m sure HLAA can help us but I’d love suggestions from people with more tech expertise than I have about webinars and web-ex meetings.

 

For more about living with hearing loss, read my books, available at Amazon.com and maybe at your favorite bookstore or library. If they’re not there, ask for them.