At the ZVRS booth on Saturday, the Z Team showcased a water ski video that had some clips of me barefoot water skiing in it. One by one, customers began coming up to me and asking questions about barefooting and my trip to Florida for the Women’s Barefoot Week at the World Barefoot Center. One of the questions that came up over and over was a question related to communication: what was it like to be the only deaf person among fourteen gals for a whole week? How did we communicate?
Quite simply, I lipread my way through the week. One hundred percent of my understanding of speech comes from lipreading. I can’t understand anything that is spoken to me without some kind of visual input– whether via sign, written English or lipreading. I can handle most one-one-conversations with relative ease, that is, most of the time. There are some folks that I have a tough time lipreading and it requires an adjustment on their part for a conversation to take place. There are probably times when I think I’ve lipread correctly, but later discover that my information processing was totally off.
Group conversations are a literal nightmare at times. As soon as I finish lipreading the first person and then ping-pong my eyes to the next person, by then a third person has already chimed in. Lipreading becomes useless at that point. The only way to handle group conversations is for folks to take turns talking and making eye contact with me before speaking or to have someone summarize a conversation. Fortunately for me, the group did both by the second day. Judy Myers and Joann O’Connor became my interpreters for the week. We got to the point where I’d just have to look at them and they’d summarize what was going on or the conversations that I missed. I still missed out on huge chunks of conversations, but that’s the nature of being deaf among a group. By the end of each day, I knew when my exhausted mind had enough– the lips would move but nothing was making sense. It was time to call it a night at that point.
Getting instruction from Keith St. Onge was a piece of cake, as I could lipread him easily. In some cases, I had an advantage, as I could lipread him on the water over the roar of the boat. He definitely didn’t have to shout to communicate while I was barefooting. When it came time to instruct me on the basics of backward barefooting, Keith called me up to the hull of the boat and had me lie down on my stomach. Judy sat in front of me and repeated everything Keith said as he positioned my feet through the steps. This instruction method worked well, as I was barefooting backwards by the third day.
What really touched my heart was watching everyone in the boat signing “awesome” and exploding in deaf applause after my first backward run– that’s a sight that will forever be etched in my mind.
