Coping
The Noises That Inhabit My Head
Sometimes I still hear the insistent screeching, like an angry flock of birds or the screaming of the wind in a hurricane. It’s the same unearthly noise that millions of bat-like creatures made as they swarmed out of the open gates of hell in a horror movie I saw once. But now the noise only creeps in at the edges of my consciousness during quiet moments, like a barely remembered bad dream. It’s one of the many strange sounds in my head that have come and gone since the day I woke up with severe hearing loss several years ago. Read more
My Story: The Day the Music Died
Until I lost much of my hearing overnight two years ago, I had excellent pitch. My brother and I grew up around music, and both of us could always carry a tune. My dad is a gifted, self-taught piano player whose range spans from Chopin Sonatas to Ragtime to English Music Hall favorites. I took piano lessons, played in the school band and sang in the school chorus. I had enough formal and informal education to appreciate all kinds of music and at different stages of my life was enamored of many different forms — rock and roll, classical, Top 40, jazz, you name it. But on the day of my sudden hearing loss, I discovered that music had become completely unintelligible to me. Read more
How Many of Us Are There?
The hearing-impaired population is huge and growing. But a surprisingly small percentage of people who need hearing aids choose to use them. Read more
Resources: About.com
Jamie Berke is one of the 475 “guides” at About.com, a website that offers personal advice on everything from table tennis to headaches. She was deafened in the Rubella outbreak in the ’60s and has degrees from Gaulladet University, the leading institution devoted to deaf studies. She is About.com’s “deafness/hard of hearing” guide (http://deafness.about.com) and provides a wealth of advice and information on how to cope with hearing loss.