Do You Hear What I See?: Soaking Up the Silence

10 Reasons Why it can be Advantageous to Have a Hearing Impaired Child

10. S/he doesn’t hear the high-pitched bell on the Dickey Dee ice cream cart that comes around every day of summer just before dinner time.
9. S/he can be summoned from across a crowded room with the "silent scream" ("GET OVER HERE NOW"!)because of lip reading ability.
8. S/he sleeps through incredible thunderstorms while camping. Children in all other campers/tents are whining, crying and screaming.
7. Working parents don't need to worry about doing housework at night while s/he sleeps. Go ahead and vacuum under the bed.
6. Opportunity to look really silly chasing your child down the beach with flapping arms, because hearing aids don’t like sand and turf.
5. No need to worry about decorating your house for years, as the walls are covered with vocabulary lists, pictures of words you are working on and object labels for those important pre-reading skills.
4. You can use the child's closed caption decoder to watch television while talking to long-winded relatives, comforting a fussy (but loud) baby or vacuuming the carpeting.
3. In the early years, you will gain the incredible ability to keep up a running monologue for hours at a time. "Do you want some juice? Yes, I want some juice. Glug, glug, glug; the juice is pouring." This is even more fun when practiced in public places. For instance, the grocery store, "Do we need some apples? Let's get some apples. Crispy, juicy apples, yummy." This Auditory-Verbal procedure will draw stares from passersby, especially if you have forgotten that the child is not with you at the time.
2. Loud party (complete with ear-splitting music) at totally rude neighbor's house doesn't wake him/her at 2:00 a.m.
1. Very close parent/child bond formed by all those hours of doing Auditory-Verbal therapy and riding to and from the thousands of ENT/audiologist/pediatrician/AVT therapist appointments.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Soaking Up the Silence

My job is so noisy, that it drives me crazy some days. Like TODAY.
I'm just tired of all the noise. It has physically exhausted me.
I'm just sitting here in the quiet. Hearing aids off. Ahhhh. How nice.
I wonder if other hearing impaired people notice that too?
I wonder if they too, sometimes just want the quiet.

Some noises drive me insane. The vacuum cleaner for instance. Running water in the tub (actually I don't like the sound of any running water). The hair dryer. Mixers. Blenders. Any Electrical saws or tools. Outside with cars constantly passing on the road.
I literally turn off my aids anytime those noises are present. The noise isn't "too loud" and it doesn't "hurt" my ears, it just drives me insane.
I've never seen them listed like that, and now that I look at it,,,,there is a pattern there.....roaring sounds.....don't like them. Odd that I never noticed that before.
Wonder why those noises?
Interesting.

2 comments:

Kelli said...: my oldest son (who is not hearing impaired but has had problems with ear infections all his life) is very sensitive to all those same things. They do not have to be loud, just roaring sounds.; October 4, 2008 at 6:18 PM
MB said...: I can hear perfectly and yet am driven crazy by too much sound. I would love to be able to turn off my ears some times!; October 7, 2008 at 4:00 PM