Ageless Passions by Karen Putz

Tag: lipreading

  • The Dance of Communication

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    There’s a famous quote of Helen Keller that gets to me. How it rubs me depends on whether I’m having a challenging day or feeling on top of the world.

    “Blindness cuts you off from things. Deafness cuts you off from people.”

    The quote is believed to have come from a letter to Dr. James Kerr Love (1910), published in Helen Keller in Scotland:

    The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus — the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.

     

    I never know if I’m lipreading someone correctly. This was apparent during a recent conversation in the boat with a friend, when he realized the conversation was way off the topic. I completely misread what he was communicating and he stopped the conversation to clarify my understanding. Turns out, I was indeed way, way off.

    Some days, the communication flow is completely ON and the back and forth banter is easy. Other days, the communication dance is an awkward one, especially in group conversations where words shoot back and forth at the speed of light. Without communication access and adaptations of some kind, whether text, sign, or lipreading, there are times when I feel completely alone in a room full of people.  That’s what Helen Keller was referring to about being cut off from people.

    I feel this every time I come across a video that isn’t captioned or a podcast with no transcript. A piece of the world is cut off.

    The one that hurts the most is the “never mind.”

    Sometimes it is hard for others to comprehend the communication challenges that come with being deaf or hard of hearing.  “You’re not really… deaf, are you?” is a question that pops up now and then.  More than once I’ve shown up at an event or workshop with an interpreter, much to the disbelief of friends who’ve communicated with me just fine one-on-one.  Lipreading a room full of people is impossible.  I attempted this at a workshop given by a well-known motivational speaker. I think I walked away with about 15% of what was said.  Think of it this way–you wouldn’t want to listen to the radio when it’s full of static and fades in and out, would you? An interpreter makes my world come in with surround sound.

    Any time two people dance together, they have to be in sync to make it work. And so it is with the dance of communication. So the next time we’re together, I’d love it if you’d reach out and do this dance thing in sync with me.  I’m always thankful for the people in my life who understand the communication challenges and do what’s needed to make the dance a smooth one.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Lipreading Strangers at the Door

    The short woman at the door was of Asian descent. A teenager stood by her side, I assumed it was her son. “Oh you’re here for the dog cage!” I said. “Come on in!”

    The woman shook her head and said something. Said a few more things. None of which I could lipread. “I’m deaf,” I explain. “I read lips.”

    The woman said a few more sentences. Nothing made any sense, it wasn’t anything I could lipread. “I put a dog cage on Craigslist, are you here to pick it up?”

    The woman shook her head. More mumbo jumbo. Every once in a while, I encounter folks that are just physically impossible for me to lipread and this was proving to be one of those situations. “Oh! Are you here to pick up your daughter?” Lauren and her friend were standing nearby, and her friend happens to be Asian.

    “That’s not her parents,” Lauren told me.

    I was stumped. I couldn’t figure out why this woman was at my door. She tried again to help me to understand why she came knocking at my door but it was futile. I couldn’t lipread even a single word. Then the gal whipped out her iPhone and started a movie. As it turned out, she was from the Church of God and she wanted to tell me about God, our Mother. She brought a bible out of her purse and pointed to the scripture of Revelations that made reference to God, our Mother.

    “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I won’t be able to understand the movie, I’m deaf.”

    She pressed play. The movie was captioned.

    After she left, I just had to smile. Accessible movies– we’ve come a long way. Now all I need is the Accent/Lipreading Translator app and I’ll be good to go next time someone knocks at my door.

  • You’re Not Really…Deaf, Are You?

    You’re not really deaf– are you?

    I stared at my teammate.  We had played volleyball together for many years and she had interpreted for me and another deaf teammate during our huddles.  This was the first time she had ever asked me questions about being deaf.

    Yes, I said, nodding my head. 

    “But you’re not as deaf as David, right?”

    “Actually, our audiograms show that he has better hearing than me,” I explained.  She looked at me with a puzzled look.

    “But you have such good speech!” 

    So I explained more.  How I couldn’t use the phone nor understand anything on the radio.  I explained my speech discrimination scores– the scores that show how well someone can understand speech by auditory means alone.  I score a zero in my left ear and a six percent in my right ear, a score obtained by a lucky guess.   The squiggly lines on the audiogram start at 90 and hover around 110 decibels.  This is the level that I begin to detect sound without my hearing aids.  The hearing aids help me to hear when someone starts speaking but without lipreading, captioning or sign language, the information coming in auditorily makes no sense.

    She paused and looked at me in silence.  “You have some great lipreading skills,” she said.  I could see that she was digesting all this information in a new light.

    This isn’t the first time that this has happened–it is something that happens frequently.  That’s why hearing loss is often referred to as the “invisible disability.”   Often people are unaware at the incredible amount of work it takes to gather information and understand communication that goes on around us on a daily basis.   And others are often unaware of how much just slides by, because it’s physically impossible to get 100% access to all that goes on around us when the sense of hearing isn’t all there.

    At a social gathering in Chicago, I chatted with fellow writers, most who knew me as Deaf Mom but were meeting me for the first time.  I think few realized that I was lipreading entire conversations and there were chunks of the evening that I missed.  For example, when the hosts got up in front and started talking, there really was no polite way to interrupt the middle of their speech and say, “Hey, can you say that again, I missed what you said?”  So that kind of stuff slides right by.  And to the casual onlooker, it probably seems like I’m getting access to the communication– there’s nothing to indicate that it’s sliding right over my head.

    At a friend’s wedding, I was meeting an older woman for the first time and I missed something that she said.  “Oh the music is so loud!” she said, and then proceeded to explain again what she said.  I still didn’t understand what she said and I explained that I was deaf.  She cocked her head to the side a bit, looked at me and said…

    “Oh!  But you seem so normal!”