Hear me out (My Experience of Deafness)

Member Name: dibuzz

Product:	My Experience of Deafness
Date:	06/08/01 (103 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none

Disadvantages: affects the childs speech, hard for people to understand as ther is nothing different to see

When my eldest son was a baby he failed his hearing tests but we were assured this was normal as babies are easily distracted.

If he hadn't been our first child we would have noticed something was wrong sooner but I think you tend to trust the doctors more and be less confident with your first.

It was only when he saw a different doctor when he had yet another ear infection that glue ear was mentioned.

Three months later he saw a consultant who said he needed an operation and would put him on the list. By this time my son was 3 and due to start nursery. When we found out there was a 9 month waiting list my family clubbed together to go private. The operation was done a week later.

Although I have never been a fan of private healthcare I felt that this was an emergency. My son would have been almost at school if we had waited for the NHS appointment and he could hardly talk.

After the operation in which they also removed his adenoids and inserted gromets he was a different child. We quickly realised that what we thought were normal childhood tantrums were actually frustration at not being able to communicate.

It was 2 years before he was speaking normally which caused him a lot of problems at school. We explained to people that he had been practically deaf until he was 3 and a half but they treated him as thick because of his speech.

My second son also suffered because of his brother's deafness. As children do, he copied his speech from his brother and doctors at first thought he had problems too but he was fine. They both had speech therapy which helped greatly.

My eldest has had several operations and his speech is not perfect but he is very bright and top of his class at school. People don't treat him as thick any more and he seems to have forgotten all about it.

The main problem now is that he can't go swimming as he has perforated eardrums and needs an operation to s
ort this out. When his class go he has to stay behind which is hard enough as he loves swimming but what makes it worse is that anyone who misbehaves is not allowed to go and must work in another class. Often this teacher has assumed my son has also misbehaved and he gets the same punishment tasks as the others.

One big problem with deafness is that it is invisible. If you have a limb missing it is instantly noticable. My son has perforated eardrums and can't hear as well as other people but as you can't see this people often assume he is ignorant or stupid. He may need a hearing aid and is fine about it as people will then know he has a problem.

Summary: