My life with hearing loss“Sometimes hearing less is a blessing!”

I have been wearing hearing aids in both ears since I started school. They are a great help and have long been a matter of course for me. Because I was confronted with my hearing loss as a child, I came to terms with it well overall. The technology of hearing aids is also getting better and better. But there are still certain obstacles in everyday life.

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The reasons for congenital hearing loss are varied. I had jaundice right after I was born. This is just one of many possible causes. The exact reason for my hearing loss was not finally clarified. It wasn't important to me for a long time. Only recently have I had more and more questions about the diagnostic procedure used back then. Here in focus: Why did the diagnosis of “hearing loss” take so long to arrive? It took years for an ENT doctor to agree with my mother that her son really had difficulty hearing and wasn't just “not wanting to hear”. My sensorineural hearing loss was difficult to diagnose in the early 1980s.

Nowadays, there are screenings for newborns to determine whether they have hearing loss. In its “Early Childhood Hearing” campaign, Deutsche Kinderhilfe calculated that for every 1,000 births, around 2 to 3 children are born with a hearing disorder.

“Hey, are you hard of hearing or what?”

Whether young or old – many people in Germany suffer from hearing impairments. Even if there are currently no exact figures (the last survey was from 1999), estimates by the German Association for the Hard of Hearing (DSB) put the figure at 19 percent of the total German population.

I have moderate hearing loss (that's a hearing loss of 40 to 60 decibels) and can still hear without devices, at least in a small radius around me. But following normal conversations properly would not be possible without the hearing aid or would be very difficult for me – and also for those around me.

If I don't understand everything in a conversation despite my hearing aids, there's only one thing that helps: stay calm and keep asking. But sometimes I have to accept that I didn't understand something. In a social context you can't always avoid it. People without hearing impairments also know this.

“Tell me, do you have trouble hearing?” or “Hey, are you hard of hearing or what?” On the other hand, I am rarely asked because I deal with my hearing impairment quite openly, relaxedly and quite offensively. If it ever comes up, I just say “Yes!” and resolve the situation quite easily. You can't see the hearing aids and therefore my disability at first glance. But actually almost everyone around me knows about it.

My life with hearing loss

People who are hard of hearing often cannot understand and differentiate consonants very well. Sometimes a sentence you hear just doesn't make any sense. That's why it helps me a lot to read lips. I do this automatically. I feel like I can hear twice as well when I scan the movement of my lips. Even if I don't understand a few words, I can often deduce what was just said relatively well from the context. I have developed these compensation strategies since I was a child.

Contrary to the doctors' predictions, I didn't have any major problems with language acquisition – on the contrary. At school, my favorite subjects were spelling, foreign languages ​​and music, and I always got good grades in them. Later I studied musicology and German. Music is my greatest passion. I listen to a lot of music, play records, and often go to concerts or dance in clubs.

I particularly notice my disability when the system fails or reaches its limits. In other words: when a hearing aid is broken or the batteries are empty at the wrong moment or when I can't wear my devices while doing sports or swimming – but also in normal everyday situations, for example when the television is too quiet or there is whispering at work.

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Sometimes my hearing impairment is also an advantage. For example, I can usually fall asleep easily in noisy environments. If the street noise or the background noise at work becomes too much for me, I simply take out my hearing aids and have more peace and quiet. This is almost a privilege in our often noisy everyday lives.