For those of you who have followed my blog, you have had a chance to come along on my journey through learning I am hard of hearing.

It has been an amazing journey.

It gets even more amazing for me.

You see my nephew, Arthur, was born with an hearing loss too! Arthur is the same age as my oldest daughter, and quite honestly has been like a brother to my kids.

I was blessed to have Arthur with me daily for the first years of his life. After he and his mom moved to a different town, and we moved various places, Arthur would come and stay with us nearly each summer for extended times.

To say that Arthur is almost like a sibling is an understatement.

Arthur has grown into a fine young man, and now plays football for the University of North Carolina 49ers football team.

KJ and Arthur

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$3 of every purchase of this gift pack will go back to the SBA (Click on the photo to purchase)

"Does ME sound different to you now?"  is the next most asked question since I found out I have an hearing impairment.

The third most common question about my hearing impairment is "But I spoke to you on the phone, how did you hear me?"

That is easy for me to answer. I have a moderate/severe hearing impairment in my right ear. A severe hearing impairment in my left.

So I heard your words with my right ear mostly. Thank you right ear!

Which for all my life I thought was what everyone else heard.

What did that sound like? It sounded like everyone was mad at me. Every person sounded upset. For real it did.

Why?

I could not hear the sing song of the beautiful sounds that high pitches or other pitches bring to a conversation.

Also, it is highly likely I thought I heard you say something differently than you really said. I believed what I heard you say. Which explains a lot of odd conversations I have had where things got mixed up. lol Oy vey!

I am moderate severe to severely hearing impaired, and I am proud!

#happyhearing

I have been blogging about my hearing experience for a couple of reasons.

One, it helps me get the information out to more people. People generally ask me the same questions, so it is much easier for me to blog about it, than to repeat the answers over and over. So thank you to those of you who have been reading my blog posts. This helps me a lot.

And two, as some know, writing has been my favorite way of communicating any experiences since I was a child. So it is likely that writing about this is helping me process it as well.

If one of the most asked questions is, "How did you learn?", then hands down, the absolutely most asked question has to be, "What made you go get your hearing checked?"

When my husband and I met, I fell in love with him for his voice. He had such a comforting voice to me, and I loved to hear him talk. Which is ironic now that we know I am hearing impaired.

I would tell him all the time, "I love your voice. It makes me feel at peace."

All along the way, we had many conversations centered around another thing that happens between men and women.

Sometimes my husband would mumble. lol

We talked about this way back when we were 18 and dating. I did not have this trouble with anyone else, so why was this so different. It had to be mumbling.

Never once did either of us suspect I heard differently than the general population.

Each time we would move on from the conversation, like the time before, with him saying, I don't think I mumble, but I will try not to.

Fast forward to 31 years later.

We were sitting outside in the back yard.

We were talking about life in general.

I said to him, "You know, for 31 years, I have wondered why sometimes you mumble." And I laughed.

I fully expected us to get into the usual conversation again about him not thinking he mumbles.

But instead, this time, my husband said, "You know, you have said that forever. I wonder if you hear differently than others."

I quickly replied, "I am happy to get tested. Who knows, maybe I do have a slight hearing loss from when I had my ear drums ruptured."

So off I went a few days later to the audiologist, fully expecting to come back with a sheet of paper that said my hearing is normal. I was going to hold that sheet of paper up, and say, "See, now please stop mumbling." lol

Four of my friends, who after learning about my experience, have done exactly that. All four have had this same conversation with their husbands over the years, and all went in to see if they had a hearing problem. All four told me they went home, held up their sheet of paper, and said to their husbands, "See, now please stop mumbling." lol

But that was not the case for John and I.

Instead, that day I learned that I am moderately to severely hearing impaired, bi laterally.

I learned that I have absolutely no damage to any part of my hearing system. Even my ear drum rupturing, loud music, and all of my constant cleaning my ears out because they felt like they needed to be cleaned did not damage my ears. (More on this in another post.)

I learned that my discrimination is 94 and 100.

I learned that I was likely born this way, and it could have been because of a benign brain tumor.

I was sent to get an MRI to rule out the tumor two days after they diagnosed me as hearing impaired.

When those test results came back clear, I was called and told, I am simply hearing impaired, and that I have never known any different.

No holding up a piece of paper. No laughing about the results and moving on.

I was fitted for hearing aids the next week.

That was the day I  heard the many noises that I have never heard before.

You don't know what you don't know.

One of the things we have figured out with my husband's speech, is that he does not always form his letters fully when he speaks. Maybe this is mumbling, but with my hearing aids I can still pretty much make out what he is saying. It has more to do with the fact that I was not able to compensate on reading his lips, which I had no idea I was doing. Matched with the fact that we also know that his voice is one of the hardest for me to hear.

The irony is not lost on us that I fell in love with his voice when I met him. (Which by the way, I love as much as the voice I fell in love with.)

We are a match made in heaven. Had I been able to read his lips all the time like I could with almost everyone else in my life, we may still not know that I hear so very, very differently than the rest of the world.

#happyhearing

There are two questions that have been asked of me since I learned I am deaf/hard of hearing.

They are,
"How well did you do in school?" and "How did you learn?"

These are really great questions.

Learning that I have a significant hearing loss has helped me understand the answers to them so much more.

The simple answer, I did horribly in school.

Teachers liked me a lot because I was a happy student. I was a student who wanted to learn.

However, my grades reflect my struggle with learning all the way from kindergarten through to my freshman year in college.

So then it begs the question, "How did you get through college?"

To answer that I would need to start at the beginning.

One of my first memories of learning actually happened right in my own home.

My siblings and I all loved to play school.

My sister was always the teacher and I was always the student.

(At least that is how I remember it. They may tell me otherwise. But this is my best recollection.)

This little school house is where I learned all of my letters.

I also learned to read in our little school.

If I recall correctly, our toy box had a chalk board on it, and we would line up two of our little chairs from our little table and chairs set, and listen closely to her lessons in our little one room school house in our basement.

Little did I know that this up close and personal, one on one instruction, would be the basis for all of my learning for the rest of my life.

After I learned all of my letters,  she taught me how to read. We read little books out loud to "the class".

I even learned to write my name in cursive in this little school.

When you are part of a big family, (I am the youngest of nine), stuff like this happens when the rest of the world is not even noticing.

This formed my love for learning.

I was excited to go to school.

My first teacher, my sister, made me realize how much fun learning was going to be.

I was ready for school.

I was confident.

The very first day I went to school I brought all of my letters and reading to kindergarten with me.

Unfortunately, when I finally went to a real school, it was nothing like my first learning experience.

My teachers were very happy that I knew my letters and I could read.

My report cards reflect that.

Little did they know that my sister had already taught me one on one.

Even though my report card stated that I had a "hard time communicating clearly"
my reading skills and letter skills showed I could learn.

However, learning in a large group setting was very difficult for me.

School was very difficult for me.

Many attributed it to the fact that my dad died when I was two and a half.

I only knew this, it was hard for me.

Interestingly enough, I have all of my report cards.

After I found out I am deaf/HOH I took a trip down memory lane.

It is all right there.

"Diane reads very well, however, she has a difficult time with listening comprehension."

"Diane is very well behaved in school. She needs to work on working independently." (AKA I needed my peers to help me! I knew that day one!)

"Diane is a joy to have in class. She needs to work on her academics and to work independently."

Right from the beginning in kindergarten there was a flag.

The teacher wrote on my report card that I "did not express ideas clearly, however I had a strong interest in reading."

Some years they had me re-do the standardized achievement tests one on one.

The years I "excelled" were the times I had to retake the test one on one.

When I say excel, it is a relative term.

My scores are nothing to write home about.

Even with the one on one, my listening comprehension portion fell into the low average, some years below average.

So the signs were there.

It always puzzled me why it was so difficult for me to learn when I loved to read and write so much.

I would go home from school and directly pick up a book or write in my journal.

I would read everything I could get my hands on.

I loved learning.

So if I loved learning why was it so hard?

I know now why it was so hard.

If you can't hear like the general population, and you are very significantly hearing impaired, learning will be hard.

It was that simple.

And many people missed it.

When it came time to go to college I took my ACT and did only ok.

Which was par for my course.

I was grateful when one of the UW schools accepted me. It was the one I wanted to go to, so I was thrilled.

My first semester was a total fail.

I went to class, took notes, and came out with a 1.9 GPA.

One thing was different that semester.

I met a boy.

That Christmas, during semester break, we promised each other that the next semester we would study every Thursday, Friday and Saturday, along with the studying we would do all week long.

We made a pact with each other that we kept the remaining years of college.

I liked this boy so much and I wanted to stay where he was, in college.

So I figured out a system to learn.

Every week, I would completely read the chapters from my book before the lecture instead of after the lecture.

I prepared even if the professor never brought the information up again.

If it was in the syllabus, I read it, highlighted it, took notes, and brought those notes with me to class.

Then I would sit in the front row and I would mark what I heard him repeat from my pre note taking.

At the end of the week, every Friday, I would make office hours with my professors to confirm that my notes were correct, and that I was understanding what they said in their lecture.

I let them know that I had a hard time learning and they were very happy that I wanted to learn the material so much, so they worked with me.

As the semesters passed by I ended up being a student that they called on in class because I was the student who understood the material.

This experience was all new to me and I grew to love the art of learning.

I became passionate about empowering others to teach themselves before they ever went their classes.

I believed it was the best way to learn, and as a teacher I started the first 2 weeks of my school year each year teaching what I began to call my process, "Learning to Learn".

I wanted all of my students to have this level of independence in their learning.

As a parent I taught my children the same thing.

I also wanted my children to have this level of independence in their learning.

My children went to college knowing this was what the needed to do starting the very first day to be successful.

I told them often that they should not be dependent on their professors or teachers.

I told them that they needed to go to the information before the information came to them.

My system worked for me, and I taught my children the same system.

My children learned as deaf children learn. I now see the amazing value in that. They do too.

As I look over all of my school records, there were so many times my hearing loss was almost caught.

After I found out I was deaf/HOH a memory from college came flooding back.

One of my professors who was teaching a lecture on Speech and Hearing allowed me meet with him weekly to confirm my notes,  just as my other professors had.

One Friday, he asked me where I "learned to speak."

All of my life I thought I had a deep voice. My mom had a deep voice.

Or so I thought.

It is not nearly as deep as I heard it my whole life.

It is still deep. But now I know not as deep as I heard my whole life.

Thinking he was asking me about my "deep voice" I said, "From my mom."

He said, "Well, you are copying someone, your speech is not natural."

As I look back now, he was not talking about my "deep voice" that I thought I had.

He was talking about my speech.

While I grew up, I watched every person speak. I watched their mouths, their teeth. Every part of their speech. I studied people speaking like it was a ballet. Or I was a musician. I knew I could do this. I knew I could get it right, and my dad would not be upset. And I did!

I eventually stopped getting in trouble for not "enunciating, articulating or mumbling."

I worked very hard at speech. It was what was the hardest for me.

Another missed moment.

Once I heard my voice for the very first ever in my whole life, after I got hearing devices,  I realized I never had a deep-horse voice.

It is very soft and feminine. And beautiful.

I had never known this.

It hit me right in that moment he was referring to my actual speech patterns and not my voice.

All those years ago, when I was told to articulate, enunciate, speak clearly, I worked hard to do that.

I was copying the speech patterns of my siblings and parents on the sounds that I severely cannot hear.

So how did I learn if I could not hear like the rest of the world?

I didn't.

My report cards reflect that all the way through.

A lot of notes about, "Diane needing to be a more independent, her comprehension is low, she needs extra help..."

all the way to grades that were C's and D-

with notes that said, "Nice girl."

Until I got to college.

And I met a boy....

I liked that boy so much that I wanted to stay with him for the rest of my life.

So I figured out a way to learn so I could do that.

I graduated with about 3.24 or a 3.42.

Neither of us can remember which one.

And it really doesn't matter.

I learned how to learn.

Inadvertently, I taught my children how to learn as a person who is deaf/HOH.

And I fell in love with a boy....

That boy was John Grover.

What a difference one person can make in your life.