Tag Archives: lip-reading

Meat-lovers & dog kicking

12 Tuesday Nov 2013

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Last week while walking back to work from lunch with a colleague, I kicked a small dog. Hard. The owner shot daggers at me and of course, I was horrified. I apologized profusely but I was still pierced by the withering glare of the pup’s daddy.

It happened while we were walking along a typical New York sidewalk up 8th Avenue in Chelsea -not too wide and relatively crowded with other hurried pedestrians. I was intently reading Sarah’s lips and trying to keep up with our conversation concerning a business project -all the while navigating what I couldn’t see in front of me because my eyes and head were turned toward her face. Sideswiped someone’s grocery bag but not so much that they dropped it. Near-missed a wheel-chair ramp railing exiting a building -only mildly dinging my right hip against the metal pole. Almost stepped off a curb into direct traffic. And then on complete accident, I kicked the pooch that had magically landed in front of me just outside of my lip-reading periphery.

Let’s talk about lip reading. More importantly, the experience of relying on lip-reading. In my 38 years of living as a hard-of-hearing person, one comment I receive the most is how “amazing it is that I can read lips so well” and it’s usually followed by garden-variety comment such as “you could be a spy” or “what am I saying?” and that sometimes leads to the obligatory game of repeating back silently mouthed phrases.

“What’s my name?”

“Can you read my lips?”

“What am I saying?”

“This…is…so….cool.”

After the fun little game is completed, I debate whether it wouldn’t be inappropriate to hand over a t-shirt that says “I’m certified.”

Another droll routine occasionally occurs when I meet any random stranger and we have a conversation. Often times, at some point in the initial conversation I may have to explain that I am hard-of-hearing and that I need for that person to stop playing with their moustache or to remove his or her hand away from his/her mouth so that I can have full view of the two lips that are forming the words.

This is where the circus act comes in. When said person fully comprehends that I am indeed reading their lips, they do the worst possible thing. They start to articulate. And by articulate, I mean go into extreme slo-mo with wild, almost unnatural gelationous mouth movements. I suddenly think of Jim Carrey performing some obnoxious scene and it becomes very difficult for me to maintain a straight face -much less understand what is being said. Some will even offer some strangled form of hand-gestures that are supposed to pass for sign-language. And I don’t even know sign-language.

I gently explain that I don’t need for them to…ahem…articulate. After all, I was “reading” just fine moments ago. All that was needed was for that particular visual obstacle -such as a hand or a piece of masticated debris to be removed. Yet the eyes go wide and the extraordinary articulation continues. And the hand gestures don’t quite go….away.  It’s in these particular cases that I want to hand the winning person a t-shirt that reads, “I”m certifiable.”

Lip-reading a large group can be likened to watching a hyper game of table tennis -with more than two players and more than two sides of a table. One of the challenges of effective group lip-reading is to find the person is talking among the bunch. This can be quite taxing in a larger group -especially when sitting around a square or rectangular table. So the trick is to settle your sights on one or two people who appear to be doing most of the talking and in the meantime fill in the blanks yourself so that you can remain an  active part of the conversation -or at least have your contributions maintain some relevance to the current subject matter.

That trick, though, has a few caveats.  At the very same lunch mentioned above, another classic lip-reading moment occurred. As it was a Friday afternoon that we went for our meal, we were all talking about our plans for the upcoming weekend. I asked a co-worker directly across from me if she was planning to go to visit her boyfriend in Pennsylvania.  She replied yes and the conversation eventually led to the pro’s and con’s of living outside of the city -meaning NYC.  More space, less people to deal with, less noise, cheaper housing….and so on.

I explained that we have two dogs and that we were lucky because we have a backyard, which is unheard of in Manhattan but we did not have a car. She mentioned that her boyfriend had what I thought she said a dog. I asked her what kind and she replied, “a Mercedes”.  My brain automatically started to try to picture what a “mercedes dog” looked like. Troubled, I asked her how big it was.

She looked at me and said, “um…not that big”.  I told her I had never heard of a mercedes dog and what did it look like? Her eyes went wide and she looked at me for a brief ten seconds. Suddenly, it clicked. She smiled and said, “He has a CAR.” Oh!  A car.  (shit.) We both snickered for a few moments and the conversation went on.

“Car”, “dog”. That makes sense. One syllable words with vowels that look the same in a darkened Mexican restaurant where the margaritas are flowing.

Moments later, I swung my eyes to another co-worker -employing the same trick of watching a person who is a lively participant to get a sense of where the general conversation was at.  Someone asked her who she was going to an event with and she coyly replied, “My lover” but because I was not used to that type of reference and I knew that she had a boyfriend with whom she lived, I thought she said, “Meat lover”. I smiled at her and told her that I thought that was cute that she called her boyfriend “Meat lover”.

She and I gazed at each other silently. I ran through the possibilities in my head… “Meat Lover. Why she she call him ‘meat-lover’? What does that mean? Is it a pervy reference of some sort? Is it really that he just loves his meat? What kind of meat, exactly? Or wait, is he an extreme vegetarian?” My imagination went straight down and through the rabbit hole. Her eyebrows went up, she smiled wanly, pointed to herself and said, “My lover.” We both started laughing so hard because oddly enough, even though it was not what she originally said, “meat lover” still made sense.

Lip-reading has been a life-saver for me. I’m able to participate in a mainstream lifestyle with very little additional aid and for that, I’m grateful. But make no mistake,  lip-reading absolutely has its hazards. Meter maid poles, fire hydrants, uneven sidewalks, car bumpers, scaffolding towers, conversational disconnects that lead to wild goose chases, misinformation and the maiming of small animals.

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A skateboarder’s herbacious high and a CI moment

04 Monday Nov 2013

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It’s week three of being activated and so far, it’s been …interesting. I want to tell you that I love it. I want to say that it’s been one auditory revelation after another and that I’m jumping up and down because the quality of my hearing has skyrocketed.

In all fairness, I can’t do that. This whole experience is not any of those things. It’s not firework explosions and crystal clarity that I’ve never experienced before. It’s not me picking up the telephone and having conversations with college girlfriends or family without a translator nestled somewhere in between. It’s not me putting on music and smiling along with the lyrics that I’ve never understood before.

No. It’s none of that. What it is…is frustrating. It’s downright grueling work. And frankly, if I’m to be very open and honest about it, I don’t like it right now. I don’t regret it but  I’m struggling with it. I’m having conversations with myself about how I knew this would be hard work. That it’s not what I expected but if I’m to fully benefit from what this whole cochlear implant procedure and process truly is, then I will need to surrender over and over again. And I don’t like it. Patience is not my virtue.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been exhausted. I fall into bed around 8:30 every night with a steady tone ringing in my implanted ear. The tone begins around 4 or 5pm every night and goes away by the time I wake up. The tone is from the nerves being overstimulated. While I haven’t experienced headaches, I do feel a deep tiredness like my brain was doing calculations all day long with an accountant while trying to also write a thesis paper for physics -two subjects I know nothing about. That kind of tired.

I can tell you what all of this is, though. Right now it’s dozens and dozens of little CI moments. Some strung together like homemade Christmas popcorn garlands, one after another. Others singular and quite momentous in themselves.

From the day of activation up until now and for the next few months, I’m experiencing what I can best describe as tap dancing on my auditory nerves. I don’t feel like I’m hearing sounds. I feel like there are little tiny people inside my head with tiny little hammers and they’re tapping away at my under-exposed nerves. Tap, tap, tap, tinkle. Tappity-tappity tap…ping!

All of this tapping serves a purpose, though. As weird as I feel, I can already see the progress of these taps, tinkles and pings. The under-exposed nerves have never heard sound before. Ever. Because of that, the programs that I’m working with are designed to slowly increment the range of sounds that are allowed in, giving the infantilized nerves time to wake up, get acquainted and become active participants in receiving and processing sound.

I’ve already worked through a set of four programs -each active for 3 days. Now I’m working my way through a second set of four programs given to me by my audiologist. These programs last for a week each. Today I’m on the second. And I feel high. Not uncomfortably so but I do feel like I ingested something and everything is a wee bit illuminated.

I wear a BTE (behind the ear) hearing aid in my right ear that affords me very little  residual hearing. Right now that residual hearing feels like it’s been touched with sprinkles of heightened color and glitter. I can read lips so much better. Sounds feel prettier. I’m experiencing less difficulty understanding conversations in front of me, especially when I sit back and allow myself to relax.

Last week I was out walking the dogs and enjoying some gorgeous Fall weather when suddenly I heard/felt a rumbling sound. The dogs jumped and I turned around to see a young man on a skateboard roll up to us. He jumped off and with a broad, lopsided smile asked if he could pet the dogs. I happily obliged and as he was kneeling over rubbing the their heads, we chatted about his own experiences with dogs. He was talking a mile a minute and I stood there, listening, smiling and nodding. I was smiling not at what he had to say but at the realization that I could understand almost every thing he was saying…and this was a stranger.

He chattered at me for a good five minutes, growing more and more animated and my grin grew wider and wider -gleeful that I could take all of this in! Suddenly, he stopped rambling and said, ‘Okay! Thanks! See you around!” and he was off, leaving behind a faint whiff of the cannabis. It hit me that he was having his own little special moment while I was having mine.

Two days later, I incremented to another program and on that very day, I attended a conference/panel discussion. Normally such events would be a battle for me. Missing out on approximately 50% of what is actually said, I attempt fill in the blanks to make sense of the subject matter. This time, I didn’t have to. My colleague and I sat up front where we had a clear view of all of the panel participants. I was able to lean back, read lips and with the help of an excellent sound system, I heard almost all of it. I was overjoyed! I found myself truly absorbing the information, understanding what was being discussed and I even felt confident enough to raise my hand and offer my own input -over and over again. This was an enormous CI moment for me.

Granted, the aforementioned event was within a controlled environment, with each person taking turns to speak and to speak clearly so that everyone could hear. Even so, this was an event of over 50 participants. That’s huge for me. I smiled for three days -even as I slept hard for three days as well because it was still indeed exhausting work.

I can now hear the swishing sound that my belt makes when I pull it through my jeans loops. I can hear the dog’s nails tapping on the hardwood floors as he trots to his food bowl. Can’t hear the cat yet but definitely the dog.  I can hear the clink of the spatula hitting the pan when making dinner. I can hear myself pee. I can hear that woman in high heels clicking across our open-air office’s cement floors.  I can hear my boss walking up behind my desk. The radiator as it gurgles to life.

The best is the yellow Fall leaves in our back yard. I can hear the leaves crunching under my shoes as I wade through them. It is absolutely moments like these that I’m hanging on to when I feel overloaded and discouraged.

Re-learning my ABC’s

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

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A few weeks ago, my partner and I were enjoying a meal outside in our backyard.  As we were chatting, I heard a sound and paused for a moment. “Did I just hear a rooster crowing?” She smiled and replied, “No, that was a man laughing.”

This Thursday will be three weeks since surgery.  This Thursday is when I go in to the audiologist’s office and get the additional parts -the external parts.  I’m super, super excited and I’m a little nervous at the same time.

What I’m excited about is what I will be able to hear. My partner and loved ones’ voices.  Different layers of music that I’ve never heard before -not just the bass but the melody and the lyrics; birds singing and water rushing; leaves crackling and Ezra’s full whine -I only hear the middle part, the deepest part. The swish/cracking sound of a golf club hitting a ball. The subway announcements informing me that a train will run express so I can get off and not miss my stop. Rain falling. Someone calling my name from across the street or the next room. My partner whispering to me during a show. The clicking sound that a cat’s claws make while walking across wood floor. The doorbell.  A full orchestra -violins, horns, percussion, clarinets, sax, flute, piano. The beep of the coffeemaker when it’s done so I know it’s actually time to get out of bed in the morning because a cup will be ready within seconds and not minutes.

What I’m nervous about is my expectations. I’m trying not to have any so that I can keep an open mind and enjoy the process no matter what. Many people have asked me if I’m excited to hear everything and I understand that the assumption is that I will be able to just “hear” like a person with normal hearing does. And this is where I step in and explain -and remind myself to not have this same idealistic expectation. It won’t be like putting a new lightbulb in and flipping the switch.

The process will include me training my brain to map sounds that it’s never heard before.  That will be the challenge. To listen to audiobooks, podcasts, various types of music…over and over again. There are several iPad apps that I can download and listen to in order to teach my brain to map sounds. It will almost be like me learning the fundamentals -my ABC’s all over again because one of my five senses missed out the first time around.

One of the challenges I will encounter is to learn to let go of lip-reading and to actually rely on the implanted ear to “hear”.  Lip-reading includes face-reading. It includes a million possible combinations of visual cues. It includes a million possible assumptions based upon context, atmosphere, association and even awareness of current events.

If a person that I don’t know walks up to me and starts talking, my brain scrambles to decipher the possibilities.  Small talk includes “how are you?”, “where are you from?”, “how can I help you?”, “the weather is nice today”, “what time is it?”, “what is your name?”, “how do you get from point A to point B?” and so on.  I can “read” those items with relative ease.

At work, I can expect to read a certain volume of terms within conversations, “timeline”, “JavaScript”, “variable”, “deliverables”, “project”, “HTML”, “video”, “client”, “art”….  I know to expect that sort of conversation and my brain is ready for that.

Same at home, “Hi honey!”, “What shall we make for dinner?”, “Yes, the cat already ate”, “Can you hand me that, please?” , “Ready to go?”, “Do you have the keys?”, etc.

It’s when conversations go beyond small talk that I work harder (and I make more mistakes).  Classroom discussions, dinner parties, conference rooms with more than 5 people….it’s like watching a tennis game with a dozen players and no rules. It’s exhausting but I refuse to disengage. I rely on the patience of those around me to fill me in on what I miss and 95% of the time, people come through.

I try to read the news, blogs, social media and other sources of current affairs so that I can keep abreast of potential topics.  I do this as an intelligent person interested in the world I live in but it also literally helps with cognizant lip-reading.  Just a few months ago, I was on the train and dipping into a conversation that was happening half-way across the subway car. I had read a quick summary of the daily news from New York Times and because of that, I easily recognized that the two people I was “eavesdropping” on were discussing the development that Amazon’s Bezos had purchased the Washington Post.  I “read” the conversation for a good three minutes before disembarking the train. A few weeks ago, I read another conversation on the train between three people who were discussing the government shut down and what did it mean for all of us.

I suppose that this sort of social/political/current events awareness would help a hearing person navigate conversations as well so I’m certain I will continue to employ this strategy. I imagine it will be a fine balance.  Learning to sit back, let go of lip-reading and having the confidence to let my ear naturally work on its own is what I will need to practice.  Should be interesting.

A Surprise Bit of Grieving

04 Friday Oct 2013

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Music for me as a hard-of-hearing person was always an interesting experience. What I considered to be good music included electronica and classical piano along with good base.  When all is considered, this would be attributed to my ears’ ability to only hear and isolate singular-type sounds.

When I was a little girl, I used to love the beginning electronic intro just before “Beverly Hills Cop” theme song -“Axel F”.  I wore the tape out in my little pink cassette player rewinding and playing that part over and over again.

Men Without Hats’ “Pop Goes The World” pulled me in with its rhythmic melody. I couldn’t hear the lyrics so I didn’t know that Johnny played the guitar and Jenny played bass. I just knew that it sounded like a easy-flowing, happy river ride in the sun.  My childhood friend Amy and I used to dance around her sun-lit house to the song on full-blast over and over -with the bass throttling the speakers for my benefit.

The first song I learned the lyrics to was Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire”. I was in middle school and I so envied my hearing friends being able to sing along with the lyrics with each other and I wished so badly I could do that.  I wanted to be cool. So I found a tape that had the lyrics in the jacket and spent an entire afternoon studying the lyrics, stopping and rewinding the song over and over again, practicing singing along with it until I got it damn near perfect.

At the next slumber party I attended, someone broke out the cassette-player and I hurriedly put my dog-eared tape in and pressed play.  Even though no one else really knew the song, much less the words, I happily mouthed along with Billy’s rapid-fire diatribe -every single one word.  It was a private victory moment for me.  I felt cool -even if it seemed like no big deal to others. I felt normal.

My high school boyfriend introduced me to different kinds of music but one moment stands out.  I remember he came over one night. He had a little red CRV that he outfitted with a rather extensive stereo system complete with subwoofers that sounded incredible to my limited sense of hearing. He recognized the kind of melody I liked and he brought a song for me to hear -“Sweet Harmony” by The Beloved.  I grinned so hard as we listened to it from beginning to end.  And then I took the tape with me and wore it out listening to it nonstop.

Depeche Mode, Erasure, U2 and Fleetwood Mac joined my high school repertoire of music that I “liked”.  Even the Violent Femmes and Massive Attack.  Later, scores of Buddha Bar and Ibiza albums would join the ranks as they all contained at least one if not a half dozen songs with electronic strains woven around some strain of an identifiable bass that I could easily follow.

I have an interesting parallel relationship with music. I can listen to one song with my hearing aids on and then I can hear that same song in a completely different way with ear buds pushed into my ears.  Some songs I’ve found that I don’t like at all with my hearing aids but others I adore with just ear buds cranked up at full volume.

Listening to music at full volume with earbuds has an embarrassing downside.  One day at work, I was enjoying U2’s “Joshua Tree” album from beginning to end while happily engrossed in a programming project. Halfway through the album, I looked up across my monitor and noticed that Robert -my cube-mate appeared to be mouthing along with the lyrics to the currently playing “Where The Streets Have No Name”.  The timing was impeccable.  Startled, I pulled one bud out, waved at Robert and asked him “Are you listening to U2?”  He smiled and nodded. And then suddenly and in disbelief, I thought…”oh shit.”

“Robert, can you hear my music?” He smiled even wider and nodded. I flushed from head to toe and sheepishly turned my music down.

Fast forward to today, I’m sitting on the porch listening to my list of favorite oldies on YouTube with my good ear when I decided to try to see if I still had any natural hearing left in my left ear to listen to music.

To be cautious with my still-healing ear drum, I turned the music down before carefully nudging the other ear bud in to my ear. As the intro starting to wind up, I slowly pressed the button to increase the volume.  And I heard nothing. I knew this would be a possibility but I guess you can’t really be prepared for that. I don’t regret this decision but I cried.

The Plunge

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

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Last Thursday, I underwent surgery to receive a cochlear implant in my left ear. It’s a little less than a week later and  I’m finally at a place in this dizziness where I can sit and write for a bit. My left ear is healing up nicely but the dizziness is from the inner ear still healing. It’s not too bad, though.

Yes, I did it. whew! Looking back, I’m thinking about how this whole process began.

It all kind of happened quickly once I started the process of consulting with the doctor, checking if insurance would cover it, etc.   I had looked into it very, very briefly years ago and it seemed too iffy back then and I also felt like there was too much controversy surrounding the whole topic.

Around that time a film called”The Sound and the  Fury” had come out. The film followed and highlighted the experiences of two related families -both with one or more deaf members. Both families were exploring the option of a cochlear implant and the film makers interviewed several of the individual family members extensively as they went through the exploration process. A highly charged film, I remember feeling dismayed by it all.  I could not relate. Even though I am not and never have been an active part of the Deaf culture, it bothered me that there was such strong sentiments about the procedure.

Before that, during my freshman year at Purdue, my roommate Amy and I took a American Sign Language course to fulfill our foreign language credit.  Our sign-language class was a group of about 20 students, all eager to learn more about the language and Deaf culture.  What I wasn’t prepared for was how negatively the professor  described the cochlear implant process. He likened the surgery to a chain saw used to disembowel the anatomy of an ear. I asked him why he was presenting the information in such a negative light and his response was that it was an unnatural surgery and that it was damaging to the Deaf community.  Many of my classmates were rapt with attention, taking his word as truth while I was seething with anger.  Needless to say, I got a C in that class.

Over time, life happened and I eventually let the idea of a cochlear implant go.  Also, over time, I felt like I was getting more frustrated with my hearing. I’m in a corporate setting for work these days -meetings, conference calls, multi-person conversations, etc. I come home exhausted and feeling basically wiped out…by Friday evenings, I’m a zombie. While I know that this is normal for a person who is almost profoundly deaf and relies almost completely on lip-reading, facial expressions and conversational cues from others, it still frustrated me that it felt like there was more that I could do.

One day my partner Lisa came home from her job consulting as a compliance officer. Part of her work was to research and line up pertinent information as related to the institutions that the bank did business with. One of them was the parent company of Advanced Bionics -a leader in cochlear implants.  As she further investigated the company, she was blown away by how much they’ve done already and how much they continue to put into their research and development.

She asked me if I had put any more consideration into getting a cochlear implant and if we could look into it. I balked at first, thinking it was super expensive and not very realistic to expect results much beyond what I hear now, which is very little.  She encouraged to me to at least keep an open mind and to explore the option.

At around the same time, I was in touch with another deaf friend that I met in San Francisco, CA. Betsy had one ear implanted almost 5 years ago and she was continuously amazed at how much it improved her life and her relationships in general.  She explained that she continues to learn more sounds over time and that it gets better and better.

So I looked into it. Checked out my insurance coverage to see what the damage would be. Turns out that it would be completely covered as long as my surgeon/doctor was in-network.  Wow. Okay. So I went ahead and made an appointment with an ENT (ear/nose/throat) surgeon -Dr. Neil Sperling here in Manhattan.

We spoke for 15 minutes and he pretty much summed it up for me…I was a candidate for this surgery. I was to go ahead and make an appointment with an audiologist at the New York Eye and Ear Institute.

I remember thinking to myself on the way to my audiogram appointment, “Wow, this is really happening. I’m checking this out! I met with the audiologist, Sabrina – a sprite of a woman who exuded a kind but serious and intelligent manner.  She parked me in a soundproof booth and after the test was over, we discussed what I already knew..I have a severe-to-profound hearing loss.

She asked me if I had any initial questions about the cochlear implant and I replied that I had hundreds of questions but I couldn’t think of any at that moment.  I didn’t even know where to start.  She explained that the next step was to read through the materials provided by the three cochlear implant options -Cochlear, Advanced Bionics and MedEl and then come back to discuss all of the information about the implant technology with her.

Armed with three folders, I pored over all three. Chart after chart promised success rates with various sounds. Drawings illustrated how the implants rested in your head. Pictures showed different people doing different things -a child and an adult both swimming, several business people sitting around a conference table, a couple smiling and snuggling on a couch in front a of a television.

I began to feel like I was being inundated with a lot of superficial information that made the whole process seem a simple matter of making a choice and purchasing a box, bringing it home and assembling according to directions. Too simple.  I was a little freaked.

I made another appointment with the audiologist. Lisa took the morning off and came with me on this visit. Together, we met with the audiologist to go over all of the technical aspects of each brand. It was a very illuminating visit and it set my nerves at ease.  I felt even more excited about it all -especially when we discussed music. It is very likely that I will be able to experience a more comprehensive music understanding with the help of fine-tuned programming of the processor.

Two weeks later, I met again with Dr. Sperling and we set the ball rolling. He reviewed the audiograms from Sabrina’s offices reiterated that he believed I would benefit greatly an implant. He pointed out that my current speech was excellent and that I would do even better after. He also said that he believed I would be knocking at his door less than 3 months later asking for the second ear to be done. I met with his admin staff and we went through the necessary insurance info exchange and set a date. September 26, 2013.

A physical, set of shots and an CT scan later, clearance was given and I was ready.  I was to show up at The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary on 14th street at 9 AM and I couldn’t have a damn cup of coffee -or anything else for that matter 12 hours prior.

The last thing I remember is the surgical team all stepping forward to greet me when I entered the operating room. Ironically, they had to lower their masks so that I could read their lips.  🙂