Educating the hearing community to help the hearing impaired person respond is important because of the number of people in the population who are affected.

According to the Hearing Alliance of America, more than 24 million Americans have a significant loss of hearing. The older one is, the greater the incidence. As America’s population ages, this number will increase.

Educating yourself

If you, like me are one of the 24 million, helping yourself by becoming educated about your impairment is the most important thing you can do. Lip reading and sign language are beneficial and you can take classes if necessary. Learning to accept our hearing loss will help us discover the best ways to deal with it.

Hearing impairment is a subject that is very personal to me. At the age of 30 I had to have a kidney removed. Until then, my hearing had been normal. However, when a major organ is removed from the body, the blood flow through the brain changes and this can affect other body systems.

Sometime after the surgery I realized that I was having trouble hearing the TV, and that conversation had became more difficult because I was having trouble hearing certain words. I became concerned about isolation, frustration, every day living habits, and safety. Having to ask more and more people to repeat themselves became an annoyance to them, and painful for me.

Recognizing my hearing impairment took courage. Withstanding the negativity that surrounds this disorder requires strength and perseverance. Eventually, I consulted my doctor, who referred me to an Otolaryngologist. (Otolaryngology is the branch of medicine that is concerned with diseases of the ear, nose and throat and their treatment.)

Through examination and testing by this specialist, we discovered that my hearing loss was severe. I knew then that something had to be done, but at the time, I didn’t have adequate finances to do it. I found myself in a Catch-22 situation. My hearing impairment was affecting my job, but I couldn’t afford to miss too many days of work. I was a single mother and relied on my job to support my children.

As part of rigorous testing, I was given two MRI’s to make sure that I had no tumors or extensive damage to my ears. My hearing loss was characterized as “mild to profound sloping sensorineural hearing loss bilaterally.” This is an irreversible hearing loss that occurs when the hearing nerves are damaged in some way.

My damage was attributed to the ototoxic effect of the antibiotics I had been required to take over the two-year period before I had my kidney removed. Additionally, like a lot of people, I had been exposed to high noise levels