A partner’s view

Tony & Sue Long in woods Tony Long is married to Sue, who has a profound hearing loss through Meniere’s Disease and relies on lipreading/speechreading to follow what people are saying to her. She wears one hearing aid but it has only a limited benefit.

Tony’s blog is about how Sue’s deafness affects his day to day life as the hearing partner. He offers useful, interesting and thought-provoking insights about how he has learnt to adapt to his wife’s deafness.

Painting a Gloomy Picture

I’m not commenting on how David Hockney chooses to lead his life. I mean no offence and respect his opinions and his options. I’d heard Hockney speak before of his severe hearing loss and how he struggled to the point of preferring to avoid people.

Apologies to Springsteen

Autumn; Sue’s back at college learning British Sign Language (re-taking level one) and, apart from Bonfire Night, barbeques are in store.We enjoy barbeques, I burn the food and we share the eating. For the first time since Sue lost her hearing we went to a large, social, type of BBQ – the sort where you only know a few people and the eating and drinking lingers past normal bed time. I hadn’t realised the difficulties a deaf person faced at such a gathering.

Rows and arguments

Hearing loss & heated discussions First off, I now know I can reply to comments posted here. I’ll be replying when I know whether I should do that as a blog or directly to the boxes (below left). If anyone wants to comment I’m always pleased to hear from you and shared tips (ideas, not […]

Hero of the hour? Or just a pain in the neck?

Hearing loss and over protectiveness Our confusion over me avoiding someone reminded me of a tremendously heroic incident by me, which ended with me feeling grumpy and somewhat superfluous.

World War One

A guest blog by Tony Long As I write this ceremonies are being held remembering the start of World War 1, I’m not watching because I’d find it too emotional. I often think about the men and women caught up by, and severely affected by WWI and, of course, WWII. How disturbing that mankind had to […]

Moon River

Correcting errors in knowledge Credit where it’s due. I’ve learned I was wrong, thanks to subtitles. I thought the actress, Audrey Hepburn, couldn’t sing and had all her ‘songs’ dubbed by a voice artist. I’d shared that knowledge with Sue and when an advert for Galaxy chocolate started with the subtitled information that Audrey Hepburn […]

Mine’s not a pint

Coping with Meniere’s symptoms Thanks to the email from Anon with comments on Meniere’s and the coping tip of vigorous head shaking, which is similar to advice Vestibular Rehabilitation gave Sue after years of sitting motionless following severe spin attacks – moving around helps ‘reset’ the system.