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People with hearing loss who have been successful in their careers

Hearing Loss | Last Active: Mar 24, 2021 | Replies (60)
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@jaema

I appreciate your words of encouragement and I’m certainly trying to be courageous throughout this process, I have a lot of trauma to unpack here, so thank you. 😊 I’m curious about your experiences in France. I tried to learn the French language in college but I wasn’t hearing the teachers nor the students clearly and just reading the material wasn’t sufficient. At that time (and for reasons I won’t get into) I was unaware of the actual effect of my hearing loss on my learning capabilities. I didn’t know that my struggles were hearing loss-related so I didn’t seek help in this way. I am curious though, and perhaps my speech recognition abilities were lower than yours at this point, but I’m wondering: you were able to gain access to information while you were in France, yes? Was this solely through written material somehow or did you have help by this time?
Anyway, I learned something reading your story. I never learned to read lips; however, now I’m thinking that this might be a worthwhile avenue to explore.

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lucyg | @lucyg | Feb 11, 2021

Hi, sorry to be so slow to reply... just got back home to Canada from Las Vegas. This time in France was very long ago and no facilities existed to help in this environment. I rarely let people know what was going on with regards to my hearing loss at that time. I sat at the front of the class and watched the teacher speak to understand better. University classes were a combination of lectures and reading and writing. I encourage you to learn to read lips - that helps so much for me.

However, in these covid days, people rarely wear see through masks . Whenever I do encounter someone wearing a see through mask, I thank them profusely on our behalf.

My speech recognition has improved over the years - this is directly due to improved hearing technology. My actual hearing loss has only slightly grown worse. I'm now 64. However, now I'm facing cognitive losses - my brain is not functioning as well - as determined my my audiologist based on my years of test results. But I believe the brain can still grow - and we must keep learning new things to stop the inevitable decline. My audiologist has taken up the harp for this purpose! So perhaps French might be a fun thing to do!

Lately I've been doing things in Spanish (Las Vegas ...) - watching Netflix in Spanish with Spanish subtitles (House of Flowers) has improved my language skills. Perhaps find a good Netflix show - in French I recommend 'Marseille' with Gerard Depardieu. Just have fun! Good luck.

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