A bit of history

As far as anyone can tell, I was born deaf. When a newborn, I had no reaction to soft sounds and would jump at my parents' approach or at a car door closing because I had not heard any warning sounds. They say that none of their other 5 children showed this behaviour.

At about the age of eighteen months, my father noticed that I didn’t come when called while in the garden. At this point they took me to see a doctor; the doctor was skeptical of deafness and thought it might be temporary due to ear infections, etc.

I evidently learned to hear and speak without any noticeable developmental delay. My brother Francis would talk to me very loudly and and my mother would get cross with him. Only in retrospect did she realize that he was doing this because I was deaf.

I started school (4yrs 9 months)without a hearing aid. I was placed at the back of the classroom in Grade 1 on the basis that I was one of the taller kids in the class. I was seated under the letter “Y” for Yacht. I thought this was an interesting word. I don’t think I learned much else in first grade.

Late that year, I was fitted with a hearing aid in the right ear and apparently got along well with it. This was a National Health (Medresco) body aid that ran on one AA cell. It was very robust and often fell on a hard floor surface without any apparent damage.

Later on, in my teen years, I was fitted with a behind-the-ear (BTE) aid. I also went bilateral. I did quite well in High School and CEGEP. University was more difficult and I found it hard to follow lectures in large lecture halls where I could not rely on lipreading.

During my 20's and 30's my hearing ability stayed about the same with only a very slight decline. For most of this time, I was able to use the phone effectively and I have to say that I found very restrictions in day to day living. The only situations where I found my hearing impairment to be a real problem were noisy ones (loud parties, traffic noise) and watery ones (swimming, boating).