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Wednesday, March 7, 2001 'You only hear me when you want to...' By ANDREW
WAITS Is that a comment you've heard before? In addition to the problems of the hearing loss itself, people with hearing loss have to put up with a great deal of misunderstanding and misinformation about hearing loss. "You can hear me when you really want to" is something that just about everyone with a hearing loss has heard at one time or another. One of the problems with the statement is that there is a real deal of truth to itbut a great deal of misunderstanding as well.
"Automatic" hearing People with perfectly normal hearing are able to hear and understand much of what is around them automatically. They don't have to get help from lipreading; they don't have to listen carefully; they don't have to stop what they're doing. They just hear. People with a hearing loss don't have this luxury. If you have a hearing loss, you have to use all your hearing powers, pay attention, use lipreading when you can, concentrateit just doesn't happen automatically. When you have a hearing loss, hearing takes attention and energy, and you just can't do it 12 or 14 hours a day. Hearing aids not only allow you to hear better, they also allow you to hear with less effort and energy. But because you can't listen carefully full-time, there are times when you don't hear as well as other times. If you're relaxing, if you're tired, if you're thinking about something else, you may not understand when someone starts speaking to you. (That's why we suggest that, when talking to someone with a hearing loss, you get the individual's attention first.) On the other hand, if you're ready to hear, if you're paying attention, if you're concentrating well, you can hear better when you really want to. You just can't do it full-time. Actually, people with hearing loss are able to hear and communicate surprisingly well, since they may be hearing, say, only 50-60 percent of the speech sounds. But we live in a very demanding hearing world and sometimes anything less that 100 percent is just not good enough. If someone tells you, "OK, I'll see you on the fifteenth," and you hear most of it, but it comes out, "OK I'll see you on the sixteenth," it was not good enough to hear most of what was said. So the next time someone says, "You can hear me when you really want to," perhaps you can correct them: "No, you mean I can hear you when I rally work at it."
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