Missing my old deaf world

Another day, another blog about how cold it is. Another journey to work wearing my blanket in lieu of a scarf.

I'm actually typing this while trying to breathe breath rings on the bus it is that cold. Thankfully I am wearing my iPhone friendly gloves, which I got for Christmas (thanks Ma), and these mean I can type without my fingers turning to icicles and falling off.

Anyway, this week I've been struggling to hear. I don't know if its my cold gumming up my right ear or if the hearing aid is packing up but something's not right, and I don't like it.

Taking time off work to get them looked at isn't really something I want to do at the moment either so it leaves me with two options - I can either wait until this cold has completely gone and reassess, or I can take them out and go back to the world I used to function very well in.

The problem however with the second option is that I don't like that world anymore. And I can't for the life of me work out how I coped in it.

*bursts into tears*

This is exactly what I didn't want to happen.

I love my hearing aids and can't imagine not having them now, but when they're not working its like I am trapped between a rock and a hard place.

I'm trying to pull myself together about missing my old world. I mean if you translate it into a wearing glasses situation it's a no brainer. I can't see anything without my glasses but that doesn't ever mean I'd do without them so that if they broke I wouldn't feel so devastated to go back to my blurry world until they were fixed.

But I think it's just because I fought so hard to like my world without hearing aids. I spent four years blogging about it for heaven's sake and I spent a great deal more believing there simply wasn't a hearing aid that could enhance my life.

There is no easy solution to this. I know I will gradually come to forget my old world even being a viable solution to getting by and I will find the time to take off to get my hearing aids checked if things don't improve.

I will also just have to tell everyone I encounter that I'm having an extra deaf week and could they please speak up a bit, while I crank the volume of my aids up and strap my TLoop system to my head to get it as close to my aids as possible. Yes I will do all of those.

And then I will sleep. Lipreading is exhausting. Before my hearing aids, it was basically all I did. Since my hearing aids, I've had some respite from it.

Yesterday after three hours solid of meetings,I came back into the office where Man With Sweet Tooth asked me a question.

I looked at him blankly and asked him to repeat. He did. I still looked blank.

Three goes later and said in several different ways, I eventually got what he said. Mental huh? My eyes had literally given up translating for me. They'd gone on strike. And who can blame them.

As I closed them last night, I repeated something that's becoming something of a mantra for me right now, 'it's ok you're deaf, you'll get better at this.'

And it is and I will.

But for now I'm going to rest my eyes on the bus. With my ears slacking off, those cat-from-Shrek peepers are on duty today - ready and waiting to lipread my world.

Happy Thursday peeps

DG
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