Personal story aims to improve 'connections' between hard of hearing and the hea...( o the much larger number of people with...),Health

She conducted interviews for the book to look at what meaning people give to events in their lives and how they work that out with others. Her goal was to learn something useful for her own family situation and for others. What she's learned is that the "missed connections" in life are, by necessity, the province of both the hearing and the hard of hearing.

"My father didn't get a hearing aid until he was in his '70s, so there were a number of years when he was a quiet man," she says. "Only when connecting more with others did I realize that some of the silence I experienced from him had been the difficulty of communicating and his unwillingness to be placed in an embarrassing situation."

After her mother's death, her father wanted her to help him get his hearing aid fixed. "I realized then how much my mother had served as his ears to the world and how important the hearing aid was for him to stay in communication with others," Stenross says.

She also learned through fieldwork more about hearing aids. "One thing that's very difficult for hearing people to understand is that a hearing aid doesn't fix hearing in the way glasses can bring 20/20 vision. It's still difficult to hear in the presence of background noise. Often, hard-of-hearing people try to make interactions one-on-one because group meetings and restaurant meals are difficult occasions," she says.

Stenross advises people who are hard of hearing to find an audiologist with whom he or she can feel comfortable. She reminds the hearing public that speaking too loudly or shouting to be better understood creates a distortion of words and sounds -- not greater understanding.

"It's more important to speak slowly and more distinctly to a partner or loved one w
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Contact: David Williamson
David_Williamson@unc.edu
919-962-8596
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
1-Nov-1999