Deconstructing with Della: Speak to be heard
July 17, 2017 |
| My mom, Rosemary Reid. |
Hearing loss is the only real medical issue challenging my 94 year old mom. Well, it is not challenging her as much as it is me. She works around it marvellously She has learned to read lips and fakes hearing conversations often. I catch her but only because we talk every day and I am on to her ways. My main concern for her is the possible isolation that can come from not being part of discussions or that people give up talking to her. She is brilliant and has such a unique perspective on life, I want to continue having inspiring conversations with her.
We went to her ever-so-lovely audiologist, Grace Shyng at the Western Institute for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing the other day as I had noticed some decline in mom's abilities. Because her cognition is so strong, she can take a very low comprehension number and move it up to 80 or 90%. If mom can see your face and there is not a lot of background noise, she is a full participant. If people mumble, talk too fast or soft, she cannot hear much at all. She might only catch every third or fourth word, if that.
As we talked with Grace about solutions she told us about "listening effort". It can be twice, if not three times as hard for people with hearing loss to listen and that can be exhausting. As she said, this is an escalating problem as our population ages. Soon the number of older people will far outweigh the young and us boomers are going to have lots of hearing issues. Makes me think of all the rock concerts I attended and how loud I would play my Stones albums. I hope my generation is going to embrace help in this area.
Grace, a faithful reader of my blog asked me to do a post about this topic. She, rightly so, sees hearing loss as a huge communications issue. As she said, this is a 50/50 process. It is not just up to the person with hearing challenges to make changes, it is also to the rest of us to do our bit.
One of her main pieces of advice is to talk clearly. Look people in the eye and connect. Slow down a bit and don't speak over other people. That seems to have become the norm in society and we need to stop it! I see this in my facilitated sessions all the time and make it one of my rules to not interrupt. Grace said the use of smart phones and speed of communications is impacting on our lack of clear communication abilities as well. Rarely do we look people in the eye as we fixate on our devices. When someone asks what you said, she suggests rephrasing rather than repeating the same words. Shouting is embarrassing and unnecessary. Try speaking 10% louder and 10% slower.
We came up with solutions to trial such as Skype calls with family and some other tools like personal microphones for people to use when chatting with mom. We are going to put mom and my husband in the back seat together when we go on our weekly outings since I cannot look at her when I am driving. We have family coming in from out of town which will include three great grandchildren and will try 30 minutes of talking stick type of group dialogue with them. Being open about the challenges is critical to good communication. Mom is not allowed to fake it any more.
To deconstruct, our hearing world is going to get worse so we should start working on our clear speaking skills now. Great face-to-face communications may seem like a retro movie but we are going to need to rebuild those skills if we want to stay connected. Perhaps if we all slowed down and enunciated like Bette Davis, our hearing challenged friends could catch every word.
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