A Cruise, from an Auditory Perspective - May/June 1998
In May my husband, Bob, and I took a two-week cruise of Scandinavia and Russia and also
visited England. This type of trip I would not have ventured in my hearing aid days,
as I hadn't felt I had enough hearing to benefit from a cruise vacation. Cruises are
the very epitome of an auditory experience, since there are activities of all kinds on the
ship, guided tours ashore, and meals taken in very noisy shipboard dining rooms and in
restaurants on land. "Cruisers" constantly contend with background noise, music,
and assorted accents, all of which can be intimidating to someone with a hearing loss.
When Bob, who is hard of hearing and wears two hearing aids, and I signed up to take this
trip, I decided it would be a gigantic "lab experiment" to assess how well I
could function with my implant in such a challenging environment. I knew that the usual
preparatory steps would need to be taken to "educate" the cruise line's tour
managers about accommodating our hearing loss. Accordingly, I emailed a customer service
representative weeks before departure, telling her we wanted to bring our personal FM
listening system to use on the tours. She later responded that she had secured the
"cooperation" of the various guides.
We found, however, that we didn't need our FM system on the tour buses after all, because
in every country the guide spoke into a microphone on the bus, which we heard easily and
clearly, even when we couldn't see their faces. We sat in the front of each bus, our
seats having been reserved for us by the ship's tour staff, wonderful young men and women
who were very careful, without being overbearing, to see that we got on the right tour
bus. In addition, they tried to assign us to guides whose English was better; their
efforts paid off most of the time, but there were a couple of guides who were virtually
incomprehensible-so much so that even the hearing people in our group struggled to
understand them. Bob and I were able to watch the passing landscape or cityscape as
the guides monologued into their microphones about what we were seeing, the culture of the
country, interesting statistics or facts, and illustrative anecdotes. On ground,
walking around, we stayed near the guides whenever we wished. This tactic paid off
particularly well when we visited Oxford University in England after the cruise. Our
guide, with his exquisite, precise British accent, had a penchant for gruesome stories
about various sites he pointed out to his flock of tourists. Since both of us were
right next to him, we got all the gory details, leaving me to muse over whether there can
be times when deafness is preferable to hearing.
On the ship, we shared a quiet table at dinner with another couple, dear friends from
home, the wife of whom was hard of hearing. Experienced cruisers, they had
acclimatized the staff to her listening needs to the point where we had been given a table
against the wall at the front of the dining room, away from other tables. The
waiters earnestly assured us over and over that this would be "our table" for
the duration of the cruise; no one else would be permitted to sit there. With my
cochlear implant, however, I could have sat happily at just about any table and managed
with my tiny auxiliary microphone, which is usually employed only in noisy situations.
With it plugged into my speech processor and my sensitivity dial turned down to
mute the background din, I am very much in the midst of the conversation in any restaurant
or party. Bob, in the same situations, uses his FM system and joins the conversation
with ease. The quietness of our assigned table, however, shows it pays to speak up
about one's listening needs, rather than struggle with communication while dining with
others, be they friends or strangers. The all-important evening meal should be
relaxing and fun, not torture.
We discovered, to our intense delight, the superb acoustics in the various lounges where
lectures, an art auction, music events, and floor shows were held. The P.A. systems
were so good that we could easily understand most of what was spoken from many rows back,
without lipreading. For me, it was pure heaven, a miracle, the answer to a lifetime
of yearning to be able to attend a lecture on an exciting topic and sit back and listen
with at least 75% comprehension, with no dependence on anything other than my very own
hearing. The art auction was the first I had attended after my implant, and I understood
just about everything bellowed out by the auctioneer, except an occasional unfamiliar
artist's name. I was thrilled to be able to follow without having to sit right under
the auctioneer's nose.
At various airports on this trip, I found that, despite my wonderful "new"
hearing, I had to remain as alert as in my "deaf" days, because both Bob and I
were only able to understand about one-fourth of the announcements over the PA systems.
Airport acoustics and the concomitant noisy bustling, chatter, and clatter are not
conducive to auditory accessibility. Thus we relied on our age-old routine of
telling the gate personnel that we had a hearing loss and needed to be informed of
announcements pertaining to our flight.
Just about everywhere we went, people were willing to accommodate our hearing loss as long
as we carefully, in an upbeat, pleasant manner, explained what we needed. Clear,
concise communication with hotel concierges, restaurant waiters, cab drivers, and natives
on the streets paid off in spades for us, as we look back on a wonderful vacation, during
which we encountered few of the communication-related frustrations we had experienced in
the past.
In conclusion, some thoughts….
I feel, from my perspective as a cochlear implant user, that my "lab experiment"
auditorially was a huge success, as it had been apparent daily that my implant gave me the
kind of listening accessibility I had never had before in my life, having been born
profoundly deaf. Yet, while the sound barrier was considerably lowered, it was still
there. It was there when I struggled with the heavily accented, staccato speech of
the head waiter at our table on the ship, when I missed something someone had said to me
on a bus, when I had to use my auxiliary microphone in the laundry room to chat with
others, when I didn't like the ship's tiny theater because the sound didn't compare in any
way with that in a "regular" movie theater, when I only got words and phrases
from airport PA systems. This trip made me realize my sense of being hearing
impaired will never entirely fade away because it has been too indelibly part of my
identity all my life. Having much better hearing doesn't erase years of viewing
myself as a deaf person or prevent some people from continuing to treat me as a hearing
impaired person. What it has done, among other positive things, is alleviate that
conditioning, make it infinitely easier to understand people, allow me to use a regular
telephone, and enhance my sense of self-esteem. But deafness is still a psychic
companion-not nearly as large as before, but nonetheless there, shadowing me. My focus,
since getting my implant, has been, not on my deafness, but on my incredible new hearing,
and there it shall remain, as I strive to continue improving my listening skills. I
don't mind the shadow stalking me so long as it doesn't drag me back into the silence of
deafness. After all, it's an auditory world we all live in!
1998
Reflections on Using the Phone
Tragedies affect all of us at one time or another, and when they hit, we spend time on the
phone sorting things out, making arrangements, and offering and receiving emotional
support. I hadn't fully realized how much easier it was for me to cope with what
happened to us this past summer because of my ability to use a voice phone.
For example, in July, my husband's cousin called from Massachusetts on an evening when I
was alone at home to tell us his sister, who had been like a sister to my husband, had
just died. We had known this was coming, that, at the relatively young age of 46,
she'd been battling colon cancer, but we had continued to hope. Where there's life,
there's hope, after all. As I said, I was alone and took the call, understood
everything he was telling me in his rich melodious voice, told him we'd come up for the
funeral, and told him where we would stay.
Later, from a motel room in the Boston area, I was able to call a relative to get
directions to the funeral home, just using a regular phone. While I had to ask her
to repeat unfamiliar street names, to be sure, I still got accurate directions without
needing to rely on someone else to help us out.
A few weeks after that, in mid-August, I got a call from my mother telling us that my
brother's 5-yr. old daughter, who has had leukemia for 4 years, had just had a second
relapse and was in the hospital. I could hear the terrible fear in my mother's
voice, the worry that was overwhelming her, and did my best to calm her down. By the
time we had hung up, she was feeling a bit better, and this was only possible because I
was able to talk directly with her, soothingly. We could hear each other's voices
and share what we were feeling. I talked several nights later with my brother
himself, and we discussed the situation his daughter was facing, the bone marrow
transplant that will take place probably around January (there are eleven potential
donors), and the arrangements he and his wife had made in an effort to keep their
household running during this crisis. I could pick up all the emotions in his voice,
the long pauses, the stress, even what he was saying in an aside to his other child.
At the end of August, I learned via a phone call that a dear friend of mine had been
murdered a few days earlier. Stunned and in disbelief, trying to absorb this totally
unexpected news (who ever expects to hear about the murder of someone whom we know?), I
spent the next two hours on the phone with various people, sharing.
Sharing is what this is all about. Being able to use the phone, even though I do not
understand 100% of what the other person on the phone is saying, brings me into the
reality of the lives of my hearing family members and friends, and lets us interact in a
way that simply is not possible with a TTY. Deaf people may take to TTYs like ducks
to water, but not hearing people, and I am thankful that those who need to use TTYs have
this technology and thus aren't cut off from phone use. There is, however, an
intimacy, a smoothness to voice-to-voice communication that is missing with TTY-to-TTY
communication. Being able to share the bad cards life occasionally deals us with my
hearing family members and friends via telephone conversations has made me really feel
part of the hearing world, where I have always felt I belonged despite having been
profoundly deaf since birth.
A note I want to add here, as I want to be very, very honest about my cochlear implant
experience, lest people misjudge my capabilities. I am not always good on the phone.
I have found that factors affecting my phone performance include telephones
themselves (cell phones, cordless phones, regular phones), noise on the phone line when I
am placing or receiving a call (when it is a problem, I turn my sensitivity dial down, but
that means I sacrifice some consonant comprehension), fatigue, noise surrounding me (such
as our dishwasher), and the speech of the person I am talking with. If that person
is a stranger, I may have trouble understanding initially who s/he is; if s/he has an
accent, the problem of figuring out who he is, is compounded. I have trouble with
telemarketers and very often just quietly hang up once I have determined that is the
caller. I converse by the hour with friends and family members who have clear or
familiar speech. If I need to make a call that involves a very complex discussion in
which I MUST understand every single word, I will use my VCO phone; I choose that option,
however, only once or twice a month now, two years after receiving my implant. Using
a regular phone, which has a volume control and a PhoneMate attached and plugged directly
to my speech processor, I schedule and cancel appointments, order items from catalogs,
call catalog companies with questions or problems, renew library books or tapes, get
directions to a location, track down addresses and phone numbers, and conduct all personal
and social calls.
Socializing: A Few Notes
On a Saturday afternoon in mid-November I was in a supermarket, heading down an aisle,
oblivious to people around me, when I suddenly heard my name called. I spun around and saw
a couple who live in our former neighborhood. After some excited chatter, we agreed
my husband and I would come over to their home that evening, and a third couple, whom we
also knew from those long-ago days, would join us. What a difference my CI made that
night! I kept up with the rapid back and forth of our 6-way conversation, only here
and there missing a remark, but still feeling very much part of the group, always knowing
what the topic of the moment was, and able to laugh at their stories or one-liners and to
make them laugh in turn. It really made me feel good about my "new"
hearing.
I am now suddenly finding myself in the very odd position of beginning to hear slightly
better than some people with whom we've been friends for years. We visited old
friends recently in Essex, Connecticut, whom we hadn't seen in over a year. The
husband told us he now had some high-frequency hearing loss, and his wife said she'd
noticed he was turning the TV up louder. It became apparent that I had more high
frequency hearing than he did, even though he still heard better than I do, overall.
I would never have thought in a thousand years I'd find myself on the other side of
the table, so to speak. It also struck me as incredibly wonderful that my friend and I
could sit in another room while our husbands were watching a ball game, each of us plugged
to our portable CD players listening to one another's CDs, comparing notes. This, indeed,
made me feel very plugged into the world.
Some Restaurant Stories
During Thanksgiving weekend my husband and I went out to dinner at a very crowded, popular
restaurant, where the restrooms were upstairs. I went up to track down the ladies'
room before sitting down to dinner. Unable to find it, I asked a lady having a
cigarette in the hallway where it was. Afterward I headed back down the hall and,
just after I passed the woman, I distinctly heard her ask, "Did you find it?"
Without missing a beat, I called back, "Yes, I did."
On another occasion, as we were leaving a restaurant, a party was entering. A man I
had just passed said, behind me, "Was your dinner good?" I turned and
called back to him, "Very good!"
Those two little anecdotes illustrate how easily a person who doesn't hear can be thought
of as rude by hearing people they encounter.
But hearing people can be unintentionally rude, as well. A waitress at our table in
a restaurant, while knowing all of us as patrons, told the sole hearing person at our
table that she was learning sign language, especially fingerspelling, to communicate with
deaf customers. Even though she knew full well that I was deaf and had a cochlear
implant, she directed her remarks to the hearing person only.
In the Car
I am now able to clip a tiny auxiliary microphone at my collar, on the passenger side when
I am driving, leaving my speech processor dials at their normal setting, and chat away
with the person sitting beside me. I can pick up a little of what a person in the
back seat is saying, also.
Talking from Separate Rooms
Visiting my mother recently, I was sitting in the living room while she was in the
kitchen, 20 feet away, out of sight. We were able to trade one-line comments back
and forth, without her having to come out to face me. I also was able to understand
a question called to me in the living room from my mother in her bedroom, 30 feet away,
out of eyeshot.
1999
Notes on Music Enjoyment
Since I have been profoundly deaf all my life, with no music memory, my response to music
may possibly be of interest to professionals, parents, or even other CI users. Only
after getting my cochlear implant did I begin to perceive what "all the fuss
was" about music, so I am still evolving.
When I concentrate on listening to instrumental music (and not do something else while
listening)--usually classical but occasionally New Age and mood music--the sounds paint
images in my mind, such as flowing rivers or waterfalls, various types of dancing, people
sharing "sacred" moments with one another, and so forth. An art lover, I
try to visualize the paintings that might emerge from the music. Some music
absolutely elates me, such as that of Mozart and Rachmaninoff, other music sounds more
stately and calm. The impressionism of Debussy is very moving, and as I listen to
him I think of my favorite Impressionist artists and their canvases. I am just now
getting to the point of almost crying over particularly beautiful music. I have
gotten goose-bumpy listening to certain pieces, such as "Conversations With
God," disc 1. Yet, despite the rich benefit I get from music, it's important that
understand that I will never be able to bring music into my soul and intellect in the same
way as people who have normal hearing.
As I putter around my kitchen, my boombox is usually on. Listening to music makes
food preparation infinitely more pleasant, and time passes much more quickly.
I also love to listen to music while driving on a long trip. When I'm
the passenger, I'll switch to an audiobook, which requires more concentration.
So far, the piano, harpischord, harp, guitar, and flute are my favorite instruments, but
the horn and organ, neither of which I liked during my first year of
"implanthood," now sound very good to me. I also am starting to like drums
and am reacting far more to rhythm than I did a year ago. I also am paying more
attention to harmonics and melodies than previously, in an attempt to understand beneath
the sounds I hear. I am not crazy yet about hearing singing along with the
instrument(s) playing, but Enya is one performer whose singing is truly beautiful-a very
haunting voice.
Many implant users who were originally hearing have said that music enjoyment gets better
and better over time. This has certainly been true for me! Being able to
wander among and explore the indescribably delicious riches of the music world has been a
totally unexpected bonanza of my implant experience.
Mardie retains the intellectual rights to her story. Its presence here
does not place it in the public domain.Please respect her rights. Mardie can be reached MardieY@AOL.Com
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