An Introduction ....

9^th September.

Well this might one day be a blog – or it might not! There are so many CI blogs out there that I wonder if there is a benefit to another one. But then I know that as a potential CI recipient I am searching for as many blogs as I can to get an idea of what to expect. I'm not putting it up yet as I have a bad record for starting blogs all full of enthusiasm and then have them tail away to nothing!

So anyway, as you may have guessed I am considering a CI. In fact I am on the waiting list for one if I chose to proceed. I am 99% certain I will but I am trying to take some time to make certain it’s the right thing to do.

I'm a 38 yr old mum to 4 kids (all hearing) with a husband (hearing) and I live on an island in Orkney and work as a finance director. All my friends and people around me are hearing.

I was born deaf, but my hearing was a lot better when I was younger – even though I have worn hearing aids since I was 4. My speech sounds completely normal – a mixed blessing as no-one ever remembers I am deaf!

I went to an oral boarding school and never really learnt much sign. I still sign “Mary Hare” signs at times – much to the disgust of my proper deaf friends who have sensibly learnt to sign and mostly spend time in the “deaf world” through work or relationships / close friendship groups.

I was the first of my friends to get married and have kids. I've moved a lot and as such have been pretty rubbish at making get together’s and keeping in touch.  I always had some of the best hearing in our year – so I never really felt I was deaf enough when with deaf friends. Yet in the hearing world I am too deaf to fit in. Leads to a very weird sense of not belonging anywhere at times.

Because I am so used to the perception of not being that deaf I don’t think I really realised how deaf I am now. I have excellent coping skills – the audiologist commented on how hard I must be working when she saw the strategies I was using – but I’ll come back to that when I talk about the tests.

I currently wear two hearing aids. I think I get some benefit from them – certainly I can hear some environmental sounds and speech. However I am coming to realise that it is not as much as I think. I surround myself with familiar people, familiar locations, familiar music and I think it is memory of how it sounds coupled with detecting a noise rather than really hearing that I am experiencing. My lip reading skills are far better than I thought and that is what is making most of the difference. Because I almost always talk to people I know very well in mainly quiet places with lip reading I can appear to have almost effortless conversations. Until you give me someone new, or some background noise or take away the lip pattern and then the truth emerges.