"Deaf"initions

On May 24th of 2011, I was admitted to St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, New Jersey for surgery on my right ear.  It was an outpatient admission for a procedure called a stapedechtomy–where they remove the stapes, the smallest bones in your body, and replace them with a titanium prosthetic.  The stapes are saddle-like structures that vibrate against other inner ear bones to transmit sound to your brain.  I have heard that they are the only bones in the body that never grow and are the same size in adults as they are in newborns.  Over the years, my stapes have become ossified, calcified, and no longer vibrate properly.

I am not deaf.  That is, I am not totally deaf, nor was I born deaf.  But I also have lost more than 80% of my normal hearing, to the point where I can hear almost nothing when my hearing aids have been removed.  The deaf community would probably not define me as deaf because I do have some hearing and I was able to hear pretty well for most of my life.  Hearing aids allow me to function more or less normally in the hearing world.  Then again, I certainly do not have anything even close to normal hearing, even with the hearing aids.

So I am unsure what term to use to define my hearing status. “Hard of hearing” seems so outmoded–it brings to my mind cartoons of old men with long hearing horns clasped to their ears saying, “Eh?  Can you speak up?”  “Hearing impaired” sounds soulless and smacks of politically correct government-speak.  Not having a good self-definition may not seem like such a big problem, but it does rob me of a good shorthand phrase to communicate my status to others in a concise manner.

Now, you may ask, why is it important to have a short-hand hook like this?  The answer is that I have realized over the years that hearing loss is an invisible disability and I sometimes need to let people know that I have this problem because it is not readily evident.

No one bats an eye if you ask them to wait a minute while you put on your reading glasses so you can review a report they handed to you.  People tend to hold doors open for someone who is using a cane or a walker.  In these cases, they can see that you need some patience or an assist and they are generally fine with it.  But even when you are wearing hearing aids people tend not to be aware of your hearing loss.  It is hidden inside your head.  And so they get frustrated, even angry, when you misunderstand what they are saying or ask them to please repeat themselves.

If you tell them that you are hard of hearing or deaf some people also assume you are stupid (there is a reason past generations referred to deaf people as dummies–there was a deaf baseball player at the turn of the century called “Dummy” Hoy, and he once even faced a deaf pitcher in 1902 called “Dummy” Taylor).  These folks t-a-l-k t-o y-o-u r-e-a-l s-l-o-w and use very simple words and gestures, like they were speaking to a two year old or someone mentally deficient.

Probably the worst thing is that people assume you are either rude, dismissive, shy, or unfriendly because you often simply cannot follow the conversation–especially if there is a lot of background noise or you are in a group setting with lots of folks talking over each other.  I am a gregarious person by nature, and few people would consider me to be shy or retiring, but as my hearing has worsened I find myself avoiding social situations, or sitting at tables in noisy bars and simply smiling a lot rather than joining into the conversation–because I have missed a huge portion of the discussion and I do not want to embarrass myself by saying something that is a total non sequitur.

And so I have taken to saying to people pretty early on in our acquaintance that I am deaf, or have hearing loss, or am hard of hearing, and I hope that they will understand–or at least that they won’t keep their hand in front of their mouth while they are speaking so I have a prayer of reading their lips and guessing at the context of the conversation in a noisy room.

The funny thing is that sometimes being this open about my disability can be a benefit, even a weapon.  In the course of my work I have sometimes been deposed during lawsuits against my employers or the buildings I manage.  Depositions are interesting circuses–you sit in a small conference room with lawyers from the other side and your own lawyer, and a court stenographer, and the lawyers get to go fishing to find out what you know, and to tie your story down in advance.  But there is no judge, no referee, and the examining attorneys have a lot of leeway to go after you, to which your attorney can object on the record for the later review by the judge, yet in the deposition you are kind of fair game for almost anything.

Before any deposition, your lawyer invariably tells you several rules–always tell the truth; tell only what you actually know; don’t guess; answer only the exact question being asked; answer yes or now as often as you can; and don’t volunteer anything more than what is asked.  The message is clear–don’t give the other side an inch, don’t help them at all, and let them figure out their own case.  If that is not evident enough, many lawyers have you watch a training video in which actors are shown in scripted depositions where they get all twisted in knots by the other side and either lose the case, get embarrassed in court, or get fired.  Simply put, a deposition is like trout fishing where the other side’s lawyer is an expert at laying out finely tied flies as he hunts up and down the river bank that is his case.  And you are the trout that has to be smart enough and natural enough to know what is a real midge floating down for breakfast, and what is a hand-tied fake with sharp barbs in it.  And you have only a second to make that decision before you rise to the bait.

Once as a deposition began, just before the court reporter turned on her machine, I looked across the table at a very smart-looking young lawyer and said to him, “Oh, I just want to let you know that I am hard of hearing, so please speak clearly when you ask me a question.”  Well, he sat back like I had just hit him in the gut, looking flummoxed and a bit shaken.  What did this mean, he was wondering?  Would I suddenly be able to get out of any traps he laid for me?  How was he supposed to handle this?  When the deposition started, I could tell he was uncomfortable, asking me several times if I could hear him, talking a bit more slowly than he had before I had told him of my disability.  Clearly I had thrown him off his game, and that made my deposition a lot easier for me.  I have used this every deposition since and it has worked to a more or less better degree in humanizing me to the lawyers and tossing them a small curve ball to consider.