No, my hearing loss isn’t ‘cured’!

I’m finding I’m having to remind people often of what I can and can’t hear because many people assume my hearing is now perfect or as some say ‘cured’! I’m hating being told I’m cured! Deafness can be difficult but its not a disease or something!

I point out to people that conversation is much easier, but I still have to lip read as I’m not catching everything (plus I guess its a hard habit to break after about 25 years!). I can hear people on the phone but I cannot hold a full conversation. I’m only getting the odd word here and there on the telephone and therefore prefer to continue with text messages or my text phone.

I also still cannot hear the door knocking and still have to rely on my family to tell me the door has gone. There are some alarms I can now hear, and some I cannot.

Noisy situations are difficult as there are so many noises to filter. Last week I was in Asda and clearly did not hear a woman behind me trying to get past. She decided to take matters into her own hands and ram the trolley into the back of my legs! Very painful. When I tried to explain I was deaf, she clearly did not believe me and shouted (amongst less pleasant words) that I was ‘rude’.

So whilst I can hear lots of things better – conversations, voices on the radio, music, voices on the telephone rather than just silence, some alarms, pedestrian crossings, crying babies, police sirens, kettle boiling etc, there are still a few things I’m not quite there yet with.

Also I think sometimes I hear something and sometimes I don’t, as I said earlier, I think its to do with how noisy the environment is and also what I’m doing – if I’m busy doing something,I might not be ‘focusing’ on hearing something, if that makes sense.

I think next time I visit the cochlear implant centre, I’ll ask for advice and help with noisy situations. On my last visit, I had two of the four programmes taken away as I didn’t really use them, but maybe I’ll ask for them back and start using them again. It might help.