Today was my first day back on campus. Sex & Gender class went fine in the morning, I am caught up with everything (I think). Tomorrow we’ll find out how much I fell behind in my other classes, and whether I can catch up quickly or what. I know I fell behind in my linguistics reading…I don’t think I even cracked that book while we were gone! I have to do some history reading tonight for sure.

Also today I had my brain scan at the audiology center. They found out that the hearing loss does not lie between the cochlea and the brain, so it’s somewhere between the eardrum and the cochlea. They don’t know why, though, and won’t speculate - they said I’d need to see an ENT doc for that. They explained why my mild hearing loss is a problem - apparently a high frequency loss takes away sounds like s, sh, and f. As we all know from Wheel of Fortune, s is a very common letter (RSTLNE anyone?) and so by missing certain sounds, I’m not able to fully understand. It’s not that I can’t hear when someone is speaking, I know they are speaking, but missing out on certain sounds means I don’t get the full information.

For home situations, I have to train my family to get my attention before they start talking to me, not call to me from another room, etc. This will allow me to use lipreading just a little bit so I can fill in the gaps, and also it makes sure my attention is focused on my ears. The reason I have trouble is because I often miss the first half of a sentence and then I miss some information from the rest of it and I end up clueless. So attention-getting is going to be important at home. For work, the audiology department is going to order a special in-line amplifier so I can try it for 30 days and see if that helps me. If it does, then I get to buy it for myself - they’ll tell me how much it costs. If it doesn’t help, uh…I dunno!

The audiologist is going to send my audiogram and the certification letter to the admissions department so I can get converted over to regular student status.

I’ve been thinking more about identity and stuff, with regard to the hearing loss. One person asked me if I was sad or excited, a hearing friend said they would be excited, and another person was surprised I wasn’t excited.

I guess the reason I am on the fence about my feelings is because of my “other life.” I’m pretty sure I’ve talked before about feeling a separation between the person I am at school and the one I am at home and at work. It’s really hard to put into words, but I know it has to do with going home every night…that period of “sorry, I have to leave” is what makes things weird for me.

Anyway, I’m totally fine with having a mild hearing loss, I’m not super-worried about it. But I do want to have it corrected, mostly because it does affect my job. There are plenty of hard of hearing interpreters, so it’s not that strange, but it would be bad if I didn’t get it corrected and still tried to work. It would also make things easier with my family if I didn’t have to keep asking them to repeat themselves. Especially my wife, because she speaks softly as it is, and when she speaks more loudly it sounds like she’s mad. She says that’s just the way she yells, it just comes out that way, but I can’t help feeling worried that she’s annoyed by having to repeat herself multiple times…it DOES sound like she’s annoyed, I’m not imagining that part, but the intent behind it is what’s hard to figure out. I don’t think she would be the type to get mad that I couldn’t hear her, but it’s hard to tell because it does sound like she’s yelling.

So I do have a hearing loss, and as long as it can be corrected for work and family situations, I’m not worried about it. If I had no
familiarity with deafness I might be freaked out, but I know what can be done and I know how to handle it. Come to think of it, I’m not so different from classmates and friends who are perfectly happy being deaf but still wear hearing aids or cochlear implants for visiting their families or going to work. People say “aren’t you excited to have a hearing loss?” Well, yes I am, but I still want to be able to hear adequately in some situations. I think that’s what it is. Yay, I have a hearing loss, great! But can it please be correctable? That’s what I want the answer to.

I have to admit that I felt a little different today in my Deaf Studies class, where the teacher doesn’t know I’m “hearing” - I felt like, if she asked, what would I call myself? Am I still hearing? Am I hard of hearing? Am I late-deafened? (A catch-all term that doesn’t necessarily relate to the amount of hearing loss.) Am I just “losing my hearing?” I don’t feel like I can just say “I’m hearing” anymore, because I am having the experiences of a person with mild hearing loss, I have been told I have a mild hearing loss, etc. So does taking away the phrase “I’m hearing” lend street cred in a similar way that using the phrase “I’m a CODA” does? I’m talking about identity within the Deaf community, not just self-identity or medical identification. I mean, I haven’t felt like a fully hearing person for months now.

A friend of mine compared it to being gay…trying to find one’s identity that way. I guess I can see that as a valid comparison. I
wish I didn’t have to wait so long for my next appointment…it’s only three weeks away, but I want answers now. One thing I know for sure, is that if I get a hearing aid, I am totally getting a hot pink earmold for it. Maybe even with glitter.

Today I finally had my audiogram. It’s really been bothering me that I’m not hearing as well as I used to, so I was very excited about the test. The answer was “hey, you do have a mild hearing loss, but we don’t know why - come back in a few weeks, we’ll stick electrodes on your head, and then figure out where to go from there.”

They’re not sure how much it had to do with the scuba accident. Apparently my eardrums are still flaccid (they used the word “hypermobile”), but oddly enough my middle ear muscle refuses to respond to even very loud sounds. Nearly all my levels are now below normal, and my hearing has dropped a fair bit at 4000Hz. So apparently there is a mild loss, but they don’t know why, it could be several things. In three weeks I will have an Auditory Brainstem Response test. I hope they can help me somehow.

They did suggest that the reason I’m so sensitive to a mild loss is because of my profession. I have no idea…if I weren’t an interpreter, would it still bother me that I can’t hear the TV or my wife? It does bother me that I don’t hear as well as I used to. I want help for that. I don’t care how well I do or don’t hear right now, and I don’t care how they help me. I want to hear like I used to.

I have big dreams for the future. I am planning to major in Deaf Studies and minor in History, and I want to become a researcher of deaf history, with a possible focus on international deaf history. I already know what I want to do first. I am hoping to write an accessible book about the history of Gallaudet. Right now I am reading History of the College for the Deaf, 1857-1907, and when I picked that up in the library I spotted another book or two about the same subject - but nothing more recent than 1985, and it’s changed so much since then! The book I’m reading now is fascinating, but it’s also mostly text; the same goes for the other book I noticed about the college’s history. I want to write a book that everyone can enjoy. I want to include pictures, sidebars, quotations, anecdotes, stories, copies of documents, everything! I think the hardest part about writing this book will be deciding what to leave out, because I can already envision hundreds of pages and that wouldn’t be very accessible, now would it? It’s going to be great…can I skip ahead to DST 780, the Cultural Studies Research Project course in the Deaf Studies department? Please? Oh boy do I have plans!

Today I had an interesting experience relating to Deaf identity.

Yesterday, my Honors first year seminar did an activity in which we placed ourselves on a scale of 1-10 where 1 was 100% hearing and 10 was 100% deaf. Nobody was a 1 or a 10; I picked 5, as did a couple of CODAs. The other two hearing girls were a 4 and a 3. I felt 5 was best for me because I am equally comfortable in both worlds. My home and family life is primarily hearing, and my professional, social, and educational life is primarily deaf. So I go back and forth just fine, I am happy this way. I enjoyed the activity.

Today in my Deaf Studies class, we did a similar activity that wasn’t as good, and I actually really hated it. Instead of positioning ourselves in 10 clusters, we had to form a line. There were no numbers, just a continuum. Initially, the teacher said “at this end, I want the people who REALLY identify as Deaf, and at the other end, I want the people who only identify as deaf a little bit.” I’m hearing, not d/Deaf, so I stood apart from the group. Once everybody was done sorting themselves, they started to notice I wasn’t in the line. So I had to come out as hearing, which is not fun.

The teacher realized she should probably be fair to me, so she had us reorganize and made it a deaf/hearing scale. I started to head for about the middle, and everybody kept saying no, move down! Somebody said “you’re hearing, you go down to the end!” And I said “oh no don’t. This is about identity, not audiological status!” I argued the point with several of them, how the fact that yes, I could hear the other classmates laughing and chatting was not the point, that we were supposed to be basing this on identity, and I don’t identify as 100% hearing identity!

They finally relented and ONE kid was on the “more” hearing side of me. We went around and everybody said why they’d put themselves where they did. I said “well I feel like a big dumb ape, because I’m the only hearing person in the room.” I explained just what I’d said yesterday, the inside my house vs. out and about stuff, and I don’t know if any of them got it. I emphasized that I felt the exercise was about identity and not audiological status. (I left out the part about how saying “you belong over there” could be considered reverse audism.)

But this was a bunch of freshmen, most of them had been in deaf schools, and - although it wasn’t explicitly said - I think most of them didn’t expect to find a hearing person in what they thought was an all-deaf environment. (And why should they? As a HUG friend of mine pointed out, the fact that hearing students are admitted now is not advertised. She and I both had such a hard time finding the HUG pages on the website that we had to email admissions when we wanted to apply!) I also want to note that this was not an honors course. Gifted students often have more mature thinking patterns, so I’m not sure these kids could even understand yet what I was trying to say.

I talked to the professor after class and she seemed to like my contribution. I also had to debrief with somebody, so I went to the honors lounge and chatted about it there. We talked about tribes, and how it would get better as time went on, and how I have as much right to be there as they do - I got admitted, didn’t I? (And the HUG admissions process is far more rigorous than the one for deaf students!)

I hope that over the course of the semester I can teach these kids that it’s okay for a hearing person to be in the Deaf-World. Does it make me Deaf? Of course not. But I’m part of the deaf community, and I hope they can come to terms with that.

I was so sorry to learn via Ridor that Gil Eastman has died. For those of you not familiar with him, Gil was an amazing voice in the Deaf community. Watching him sign was like listening to James Earl Jones speak…rich, powerful, and intense. He contributed so much to the Deaf arts community and the community at large. With Mary Lou Novitsky, he co-hosted “Deaf Mosaic” for 10 years, a fantastic newsmagazine produced at Gallaudet University that I watched every Sunday when I was a kid; he won an Emmy for his involvement in the show. He was also known for stirring performances of ASL literature, including a great version of the U.S. national anthem (Star-Spangled Banner). He contributed to a production of ASL poetry on videotape, he wrote plays about Deaf people and Deaf culture, and he was a professional storyteller.

I am greatly saddened by Gil Eastman’s death, I had always hoped to see him speak in person. I will have to resign myself to watching as many old tapes as I can, so I can see those beautiful signs over and over.

This post is the result of seeing the capitalized word “Hearing” used to mean a hearing person who is pro-Deaf people. I have seen it before, I believe in deaf, it bothered me then and it’s time to think about why. It strikes me as wrong for two reasons.

First, it’s mis-capitalized. A Deaf person is proud to be deaf, right? So a Hearing person is proud to be hearing, it has nothing to do with if they support d/Deaf people or not. Or worse, if you want to get exclusionary or audist about it, a Deaf person might prefer to socialize only with other Deaf people, so a Hearing person would prefer to only socialize with other Deaf people - BOTH groups are audists because they’re discriminating on the basis of hearing status. I can appreciate wanting to be “with the tribe,” I’m not saying it’s bad to only be with people of your own kind…but it’s bad to turn “I want to be with people like me” into “I don’t want to be with people who aren’t like me.”

Second, we all know that the number of Deaf people in the U.S. is smaller than the number of deaf people. There are tons of elderly people who can’t hear at all but they are not Deaf. Therefore, Deaf people are in the minority within the greater deaf group. And if “Hearing” means someone who is pro-Deaf, then it’s perpetuating the idea that supporting Deaf people is a minority act. Everybody should be supporting Deaf people, or at least not caring about hearing status. Distinguishing pro-Deaf hearing people with a different name highlights the fact that there are fewer of them, and de-emphasizes the need to have everybody be pro-Deaf. (I’m using pro-Deaf as the antonym of anti-Deaf…that is, not afraid of, or disturbed by, Deaf people - I’m not saying every hearing person should work in the Deaf-World or have Deaf friends.)

I see “Hearing” as an offensive neologism and, speaking as a pro-Deaf hearing person, I don’t like to see that word used to describe me.

I took my CI test yesterday at Gallaudet. I can’t go into details because we sign a confidentiality agreement - I can’t tell anything about the warmup or test materials themselves. I got there right on time, though, and there was hardly anybody in Fay House (the home of Gallaudet Interpreting Services). I filled out my initial paperwork and waited patiently while the LTA explained everything to the woman who was going to be replacing her on Monday. They set me up with the practice tapes and I chose which speakers I wanted to work with, and then I reviewed the practice speeches for each one.

I took a short break while the LTA set up the tapes for the actual test. I think I did okay; there were some parts I fumbled. I didn’t walk out of there with the same “I aced this!” feeling I had after my CT test, but I think I did okay.

I will say one thing about one of the tapes I picked. It was related to computers, but these tapes are from the early-to-mid 1980’s at best. So it was pretty funny to hear the guy describing what is now archaic technology! At one point he mentioned the name of a long-defunct service, and I really had to dig deep in my brain to remember the what that company was called.

The wait is apparently three to four months for results now, which beats the nine months I waited for my CT test results. I think I have also heard of results coming as fast as two and a half months, so hopefully I’ll hear those results around the same time as I hear back about whether I’ve been accepted (!) to Gallaudet.