Dear unnamed follower - since you want to remain anonymous, I'm answering your questions in a post.
"are you wear bte aid? what kind? what happen to make you deaf? how profound your loss is? were you always wear them or just recent?"
This will be extremely long, but it should answer most questions involving my hearing. The short-form of it is this: I am almost completely deaf in one ear and slightly "impaired" in the other, though most people don't notice it. BAM.
THIS SHOULD NOT CHANGE ANYTHING ABOUT MY RELATIONSHIPS WITH ANYONE WHATSOEVER - I AM THE SAME PERSON I WAS YESTERDAY, NOW YOU KNOW MORE.
I do wear behind-the-ear hearing aids - lately just the one, or none at all, but I have used two before, mostly as a smaller child. The one I currently have is an olive green Phonak with large amplifier. I also have a tiny, cheap, flesh colored digital (Acoustitone) bte that I wore in college to be more discreet - it was worn in my right ear because I have more hearing in that ear and was better able to understand things with it amplified a bit.
My loss was not discovered at birth, as I was born in a country that did not exactly practice the safest medicine - it wasn't even an issue until around winter when I was four, so four and a half give or take; that is when I can remember not being able to hear the things I used to. People at the time considered it a mental problem. It has since been classed as an ISHL. (idiopathic sensorineural hearing loss). I had already acquired spoken language (Croatian) and was in a traumatic situation at the time of onset, which could have contributed to it, but that is unlikely. I was almost eight years old when I was formally diagnosed by my audiologist, Dr. Snook. I have been with her for twelve years now, almost - she is absolutely wonderful! We have followed her through office changes and everything, she is that good. Anyway, I was formally diagnosed and fitted with hearing aids by the time I was eight, and my hearing tests usually came back as so: left ear - 80-90dB loss, right ear - 50-70dB loss. With the hearing aids, my hearing still was not improving as well as they hoped, but it helped enough that my speech and language comprehension weren't noticeably affected, plus I was still in both ESL and speech programs. As I acquired more English, I acquired ASL and am at least ten years fluent in both. When I was twelve, turning thirteen, I had a mild operation which implanted tubes in both ears and gave me back a good 40dB of hearing in each ear - it was PHENOMENAL. I really came into my own as far as music is concerned in middle school. I became much more confident in my dance classes, too. But I started to get sick a lot, and with each fever over a certain degree, my hearing would fluctuate. I am functional without hearing aids - I can hear enough to know when sound is happening, and adapted well enough to know who to look at and whose lips to see.
I am Hard of Hearing, not Deaf - my loss is not profound. I have hearing. Currently, my hearing is: left - 70-80dB loss, right - 30-40dB loss. I am fully functional with or without my hearing aid in, though lately I have preferred to keep it in. I personally don't think having one improves my quality of life; I am still musical with or without one, I still speak with or without one, and most people can hardly tell there is something off about the way I speak or listen. I do not have the stereotypical "deaf accent" that most people look for when dealing with hard of hearing and deaf people, and as a result, some people never know I have a problem hearing them. At home and on most televisions I rely on CC, a select few being exceptions. I do read lips and I only choose to speak on the phone if it is something I deem high priority (basically I only ever talk to Lauren and a couple of other people on the phone, occasionally) - it is absolutely do-able with my hearing aid. I can do pretty much anything perfectly normally. It's not actually as severe an issue as it sounds.
The only difficult part of having a hearing loss like this is that I straddle both worlds - Deaf and hearing, and I do not fully belong in either. I exist the best I can in both, and am generally pretty happy doing so. I may ask people to repeat themselves more than most people, or fail to realize if someone is speaking to me or someone around me and ask, "huh?" or "what?" a lot, but as long as people can get past that, I am just like everyone else, and could care less whether people know I am hard of hearing or not when I interact with them. It doesn't actually make a difference for me - I almost always position myself accordingly, and have always taken full initiative at enhancing my communication with the people around me.
So that's that - I am a hearing Deaf kid, perfectly normal in all things except that I don't always hear you.
