by Michael Griffin

     Some people might see being hearing-impaired as a burden. They might cite an example like not being able to hear conversations at optimum levels. My response is, that while I would like to have all of my senses, life without full hearing is not as bad as people might think.

     When I wake up in the morning, I get to do something that a lot of people probably wish they could do: I let the world in when I'm ready. When I stumble out of bed in the morning, it's in silence. I'm hearing-impaired, you see, and I sleep with my hearing aid off, so while the world of New York City rumbles around outside, I'm in my own vacuum of silence.

     Part of the necessary biographical information: Born three weeks premature due to a cytomegalo virus developed in utero, I was an undiagnosed hearing-impaired person for the first year and a half of my life, partly due to a doctor's miscalculation. The doctor put me down on the floor, stood behind me and said my name, and I turned around for a reason other than my hearing my name, the doctor pronounced me hearing. The fact that I had picked up somewhat of a vocabulary despite not hearing anything unless it was spoken almost directly into my ear was also misleading. After a six-month move, my parents switched doctors and that's when I was diagnosed. I got my first hearing aid when I was two, and haven't looked back since.

     My father tells me of the times that he would hold me as a baby, singing to me. Apparently I enjoyed it, as he said that I was always smiling when he did it. This doesn't convince me, as my father's voice is so bad, he's banned from singing in showers all over the United States and abroad. I've reached two conclusions instead: Either I was already hearing-impaired at this point and was just smiling at the comforting vibrations of my father's voice or I was smiling because my eardrums were retreating into my skull, like an armed force retreating from an enemy's assault.

     I was first placed in the Lexington School For The Deaf, but after my nursery school year there, the faculty told my parents that I had enough hearing to be mainstreamed, and my parents took me out, over the school board's objections, and placed me into a regular hearing school.

     My level of hearing with a hearing aid (I only wear one, since my left ear is completely deaf, a useful thing if my right ear is on the pillow while I'm asleep, as I'm completely unaware of the world around me) is conversational level, so I never needed to resort to using FM-Loops or learning sign language. Another friend of mine in high school, who is also hearing-impaired like me, but more profoundly so, didn't need those things in high school, with the classes being small, but he needed them in large lecture halls, and he told me one story about how he was in this lecture hall and the professor was wearing the FM Loop. Basically the FM Loop, for the uninitiated, is a system where one person wears a microphone, and the other person wears a receiver that loops around the neck (hence the name FM Loop) and the person's speech gets piped directly to the hearing aid. So my friend is in the middle of this lecture and realizes that he has to go to the bathroom. He gets up and begins going up the stairs to use the bathroom. The professor stops the lecture and says that a lecture is still going on. My friend, still walking up the stairs, said that the signal carried into the bathroom and that he could hear her. The professor's face turned beet red.

     Since my compensations for that was to sit in the front row of the class and just take good notes, I never had that occur. The only trade-off was that I was an ideal target for the professor to call on, being in the front row, and thus in the professor's field of vision. I'd like to say that it made me a better student, but there were days that I was still woefully unprepared.

     I can find humor in this situation of mine, and I've even mulled over possibly being a stand-up comic, but my fear of standing in front of crowds has kept me from doing that. I've wondered things, like why people can buy fake glasses to look more intelligent, but why people never buy fake hearing aids to appear to be better listeners. My aforementioned friend and I would also conduct lip-reading conversations in class in high school. We thought it was funny, but the substitute teacher didn't and threw us out of class one day. Since it was the last period of the day, it didn't bother us that much. While he and I never adopted an ‘us versus them’ mentality in school, when we were both living in Boston and would drive back to New York for the holidays, we sometimes liked to pretend to get into fake sign language arguments to see the reactions of drivers around us. We were especially interested in the reactions when he took his hands off the wheel to sign.

     Functioning in today's world, while I'm uncomfortable talking on the telephone with complete strangers, to the point that it takes a lot of mustering of courage to make a cold telephone call, and some people may weary of my asking them to occasionally repeat themselves, especially in a crowded place, such as a bar, I find that most people accept me as I am. I just carry along a tape recorder to any interviews that I do, and I may ask if you have a business card with you, as names are so much easier if I get to see them in print, rather than going into the vortex that is my ears. And I might ask you to slow down in speaking, but that is really all the concessions that I ask. After all, life is a trade- off. If you let me into your world, I’ll let you into mine. Just please allow me to go find my hearing aid first.