This Much Is Clear

Why are they advertising the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra all over the Philadelphia airport? Carren Stika wondered as she traipsed toward baggage claim. She stopped at a pay phone and noticed the area code: 216.

“That’s when I realized--oh, no! I’m in Ohio!” she says.

Stika hadn’t heard the garbled buzz of the in-flight announcement, so she hadn’t known about the unscheduled touchdown in Cleveland. A fuzzy speech signal; the fuzzy ability of her ears to hear. Combining to confound her again.

“Every one of us has stories like that,” says Stika, who, years after the airport incident, is a director of research for a San Diego rehabilitation center for people with hearing problems.

By “us,” Stika means the hard of hearing, a condition she first knew she had at age 20, when she sat crying in the specialist’s office with her hearing loss newly diagnosed. But her hearing loss likely dates back much further. That’s why her school report cards would come home with comments like “Needs to listen more carefully.” Why she had a lisp as a kid. Why college friends would tell her she sometimes seemed stuck-up or out of it, because she would “ignore” folks who said hi, fail to laugh at jokes or chime in on conversations in off-kilter ways.

“People attribute those kinds of mistakes to everything but hearing loss,” she says. “You’re spacey. Inattentive. Preoccupied. Or not too bright. Everything but hard of hearing.”

Twenty-eight million Americans have hearing problems, ranging from the mild to profound. For some people, the losses were always there, or swooped down overnight from a viral infection or some other cause. For Stika and most others, the losses build up slowly over years.

Human beings aren’t like panda bears or wildcats, happy living lives of isolation. It’s in our nature to surround ourselves with other humans, and getting along smoothly in life has everything to do with how adeptly we deal with the people with whom we rub shoulders.

It’s hard enough surviving in an intensely social world when you can hear what people are saying. Imagine what it’s like when you can’t.

* Your partner calls out from upstairs, or chatters away in front of a humming refrigerator or a running faucet, and your anger surges once again: He should know by now that you won’t know what he’s saying! Or you ask him to repeat himself and he snaps at you.

* A friend invites you to a dinner party and you sit in virtual silence all night, unable to hear half of what’s being said, tired from trying. You stay home more, isolating both yourself and your partner.

* At the grocery store, you can’t hear the soft-spoken checkout clerk, even after you’ve asked her to repeat herself. She’s looking at you as if you’re a half-wit. You’re embarrassed.

* At work, you’re afraid to draw attention to your hearing loss, so you don’t ask for a phone with adjustable volume or other accommodations to help you do your job.

These, say psychologists and other hearing specialists, are the oft-repeated stories of the hard of hearing--of aggravations, guilt and resentments piled on top of the regular stresses of life. That and a simple sadness in the loss of easy, effortless chatter about nothing in particular; in a slow, steady drifting apart.

It’s easy to see how a marriage can suffer under the strain. Leonard and Elayne Breslaw of Woodland Hills face off daily over such matters as the volume on the television or radio--even though they now have separate living rooms and Elayne has put tape over the volume controls so Leonard can’t turn them up too high.

They’re not going anywhere, getting divorced, any of that, says Elayne, 59: “I love him, he’s mine--he’s my best friend despite everything.”

But she admits to feeling “anger, anger, anger!” at the way their roles have changed. When they married, she says, he was her protector. Now, because he can’t hear well--not the doorbell, the fire alarm, the shatter of glass during an earthquake--she feels that she is his. For his part, Leonard, 75, wishes his wife were more sympathetic. “I have to remind her 24 hours of the day,” he says, “that I have a hearing loss.”

Many fare worse than the Breslaws, who have achieved a detente of sorts in their three-story townhouse, meeting in the middle floor for meals.

People who do nothing about their hearing loss--and that is most people--fare worst of all.

Indeed, a national study found that people with hearing problems who didn’t wear hearing aids were significantly more likely to feel sad, to withdraw socially and to think people were getting angry with them for no reason than people with hearing aids. The 1999 study by the National Council on the Aging, which surveyed 2,300 adults with hearing loss as well as their friends and relatives, also found that people who began wearing hearing aids reported improvements in many areas of their lives.

So did their families and friends.

Frustrations for normal-hearing relatives are many, says Sam Trychin, a San Diego psychologist who works with the hard of hearing. Impatience when a loved one won’t wear a hearing aid or reveal that they’re hard of hearing; when a spouse would rather guess what you said than ask you to repeat yourself; a relative who leans on you heavily to interpret, who accuses you often of talking too fast and mumbling.

There are solutions to these problems. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Dr. John Ribera, a clinical audiologist in Los Angeles, rolls his eyes when the subject of “admitting it” comes up.

“I’ve had a lot of couples come to me over the years,” he says. “Usually it’s the fellow who has the hearing loss--but he’s not the one who initiates coming in to see me. It’s the wife. Why? She is tired of having to repeat herself all the time, of him going around saying ‘Huh? What did you say? Speak up! Articulate!’

“ ‘Doc,’ he’ll say. ‘The only reason I’m here--I don’t have a hearing problem. But my wife said I should come in and get a hearing test.’ So we put the earphones on, run the test, and lo and behold, we find a high-frequency hearing loss.”

One reason for such denial is the creeping-up-slowly nature of the problem: If it happened overnight, it would be much easier to spot.

Another reason is that when people lose their hearing, they tend, first, to lose the ability to hear high tones--ones that allow us to hear consonants, like “f” and “s” and “sh,” which give speech the lion’s share of its intelligibility. Someone’s voice may still sound loud. But now it sounds like they’re mumbling.

And then there is vanity (hearing aids aren’t pretty), pride (I’m getting old) or fear (my boss will think I’m incompetent). But whatever the reason, people need to get past it, says Brenda Battat, executive director of Self Help for Hard of Hearing People, or SHHH, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Bethesda, Md.

“If you don’t admit to hearing loss, then you don’t tell people what they need to do in order to communicate with you,” she says. “This just prolongs the time it takes to adjust and find solutions.”

Hearing aids are one of the solutions, but cost is often an issue. That’s why SHHH and other groups are pushing hard to get health insurance plans to cover the aids. And while vanity is still a concern for many people, some of the newest models are placed inside the ear and can barely be seen. But it can take several tries with different models and settings before a good fit is found.

Hearing aids just amplify, though; they don’t repair damaged ears or restore the hearing you used to have. Many other devices can offer additional help: a variety of “assistive listening devices,” which bring sound even closer to the ear; vibrating alarm clocks; visible smoke detectors; special phones and hundreds of other handy gadgets. There are coping and lip-reading classes, too--and support groups, filled with people similarly struggling with hearing loss, eager to share stories and solutions.

“We can’t solve all their problems, but we can help them get a start,” says Phil Kaplan, president of the San Fernando Valley chapter of SHHH.

The Art of Speech-Reading

In a room on the fifth floor of Los Angeles’ House Ear Institute, five people are working on solutions.

They’ve run through a battery of coping skills. Learned much about the technology that can help them. Now they’re practicing lip-reading--more properly known as speech-reading--with Sister Felice Kolda, an audiologist and a Roman Catholic nun.

Most people--even if their hearing is normal--use speech-reading to some degree, says Kolda, an expert lip reader who occasionally is asked by movie studios to reconstruct dialogue when sound footage is lost from a film.

But for hard of hearing people, honing the skill becomes much more important.

As the class begins, Gene Cox, 66, who lost all his hearing in 1998 and now wears a surgically implanted hearing device known as a cochlear implant, pulls down the shades so the sunlight won’t throw his face in shadow, making it impossible for students like Lisa Diaz and her mother, Hortensia, to see his face.

Hortensia is totally deaf. She’s so familiar with her daughter that she can read her lips from the side, in the car, she says. Lisa can still hear some with her aids, but her hearing is gradually worsening.

Lipstick’s great for lip-reading, the class agrees: It makes the lips stand out. Fat lips and expressive eyes are good, too.

Bushy beards and mustaches are bad for lip-reading (though fine if you pin them back with paper clips, as one Hasidic Jewish teacher of the deaf is known to do). Such facial hair hides the lips.

People who try to help by exaggerating their speech and people with thick accents are hard to read because their lips move differently. Class participants William and Mary Mullen of Boston, a couple in their 80s who are both losing their hearing, have strong New England accents--so when they say “Harvard” their lips don’t move “right,” jokes Cox. (The Mullens insist it’s the other way around.)

Then the class takes turns silently reading sentences to each other--and while they miraculously decipher many silent utterances, they also slip up, decoding “I lost my ring in the water,” for instance, as “I lost my wristwatch.” Precisely the kind of halfway-there mistake that can lead you into trouble--especially if you try to bluff in a social setting or business meeting.

Don’t do it, groans William Mullen. “You answer incorrectly, and everybody knows it because they all heard it. You look like a big fool.”

Implications for One’s Social Life

At a New Orleans conference, two SHHH members, David Crocker, a 42-year-old business manager, and Steve Culfogienis, a 30-year-old electronics engineer, are also discussing solutions at a workshop they’re running titled “Sex and Hearing Loss.” There’s much debate in the packed room about when it’s best, on a hot steamy date, to tell someone you’ve got a hearing loss. Before you snuggle too close and your hearing aid squeaks and the date gets a big shock.

One 60ish woman has gently suggested that, old-fashioned though it may seem, one should feel familiar enough with a person to share such information before sleeping with them. The room erupts with laughter.

Levity aside, this is serious. Finding love is tricky enough without the added fear of rejection because of your disability, or an extra communication hurdle. Culfogienis came within a whisker of never dating the woman whom would eventually become his fiancee. She’d seen this cute guy on the train, spoken to him and he’d ignored her--because he couldn’t hear her. She’d thought it incredibly rude. (Luckily, their paths crossed again, and “she decided to give me another chance,” he says.)

Then the two men and their friends act out a string of skits. In one, an actor tries to chat up a woman in a bar, making mistakes that the audience points out: touching her to get her attention, hanging too close. And failing to tell her he’s hard of hearing and then trying to guess what she said.

In another skit, the same actor is with a date at a party, bobbing miserably around the edge of a group of people who are excluding him without meaning to--turning their backs so he can’t see their lips and bantering too fast for him to follow.

Then the actors revisit the skit, and now the man fits in effortlessly. Instead of trying to join in a conversation with many, he’s picking people, one by one, to chat with. The audience seems to breathe a big, collective sigh of relief.

“For a moment or two, I felt really sad for him,” says a woman at the back of the room. “I mean, we’ve all been in situations like that.”