CLOSE-CAPTIONING YOURSELF
By Terri DelCampo
Simple conversation is a pleasure for
me. I not only get closer to my loved
ones, as well as people I run into at the grocery store or strolling around
downtown Alpharetta, but as a writer, seemingly unimportant comments or tidbits
will often embed themselves into my mind and become an article or story
later.
But when someone you love becomes deaf, it
can turn that pleasurable conversation into a torturous, grueling marathon of
failure to be understood.
It started with my mom, who I call on the
phone (she lives 800 miles away from me in Delaware) every Sunday. We chat for hours (no exaggeration, she kills
my phone every week and I have to put it on the charger for the last third of
the call) and I would say about a third of that time is me repeating myself so
she can understand me. I would switch to
writing her letters, but that's just not the same. She's eighty-seven and lives alone. She's active and sees friends weekly, but she
looks forward to my call each week. She
has Meniere's Disease that causes her to have a constant whooshing sound (her
description) in her ears – not something a hearing aid will help.
Our frustrating conversations have been
going on for the past fifteen years, possibly a little longer. I love hearing my mom's voice, I just wish
she could hear mine.
Recently I fell in love and married Mr.
Write – not just a cute play on words: I am a horror writer and my husband is
Blaze McRob, also a horror writer and publisher. We met on Facebook when he posted a review of
my dark fiction magazine. We began messaging
on Facebook, and became immediate friends.
I began doing some editing work for his small press, and our friendship
grew, finally turning into a romance.
Fourteen months after the review, we were married. And I adore him.
Bless his heart, he's had bouts with ear
cancer, that while currently in remission have that left him almost completely
deaf. When he came to Georgia, and we met and spoke
for the first time, we were hugging at the bus station and he heard "I
love you, let's go home," because I said it right into his sweet damaged
ear.
But verbal conversations are not our
forte, by a long shot.
Sometimes I get so frustrated, I just stop
and say "never mind," and I can't be doing that, because I know it
hurts his feelings, which in turn hurts mine.
And almost as important, I simply refuse to let a disability mangle our
otherwise wonderful communication.
When my mother was visiting one time, I
didn't want to keep shouting my end of the conversation, so I fired up my
computer and created an MS Word doc with HUGE font. I typed my side of the conversation thinking,
Wow!
I'm close-captioning myself! Mom answered verbally as usual. It worked well for us. It takes a little longer to type out my
'lines,' but actually not much longer than if I repeat myself multiple times,
stopping in frustration to count to ten when I cannot make myself
understood.
So that's my little trick. Close caption conversations for my deaf loved
ones. And there's always the low tech
trick: keep a scratch pad handy to write
out a word or two that the deaf person may be getting hung up on.
If there is anyone reading this who has
any other suggestions, I'm wide open, feel free to comment away. I'm a writer – communication is my thing and
I will find a way.
TD – 1/12/2016
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