Coping with deafness in a hearing world
The first obstacle was the telephone. They didn’t have one. Of course. What use is the telephone to a deaf person?
Communication with the deaf must, in most cases, be face to face.
The next obstacle was the doorbell. How on earth would they hear it ring? Should I knock?
I find out later a flashing light alerts them to the fact that someone is at the door, rather than a bell.
Cushla Henry is deaf, but she can understand the words I am speaking. She’s reading my lips. However, I must try to speak slowly and face her directly when I do.
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However, the conversation flowing through her hands — the language of “sign” — is precise and extensive. I am the handicapped one in to try to decipher it.
Cushla was born deaf as a result of medication prescribed to her mother for a throat infection when she was pregnant.
Her husband Brian is profoundly deaf. He cannot speak words and he cannot understand my words.
He communicates to me through Cushla.
Brian’s parents had normal hearing, but bore three deaf children out of five. His sister Pauline also gave birth to deaf children.
Cushla, 27, and Brian, 35, have been married for five and a half years. They met at a Catholic camp run by the Deaf Association.
They have a four-year-old child, Joseph, and a seven-month-old baby, Travis. Both have full hearing.
A daughter, Fayette, died two years ago from a combination of pneumonia and a heart disorder. She was born with a genetic disorder Trisomy 18, which left her with only 18 pairs of chromosomes instead of the normal 23 pairs.
As my going into the deaf world posed obstacles for me, so their life in a largely hearing world is at times very difficult.
Their difficulty is exemplified in the suffering they endured throughout Fayette’s illness and subsequent death, a suffering compounded by their deafness.
“They worried they couldn’t hear her breathing, or when she was crying in the night. They couldn’t understand what the doctors were saying when she was taken into hospital care.
She is remembered by the couple as “very beautiful” and “a special life”.
Cushla can read and write. Brian reads – but writing is not so easy.
“The first time I met him he wrote a letter to me. I found it difficult to read, but I know perhaps one word,” she says.
Both use sign language to communicate to each other, but it is a language they were initially denied at St Dominics School for the Deaf in Feilding which they both attended as youngsters.
“The sisters wanted us to speak. They wanted to teach us how to make sounds with our voice,” says Cushla, who learned her “own” sign language by copying other deaf people and making up signs.
St Dominics only started teaching sign language about five years ago.
Without a complete education – and without hearing – getting a job is difficult for Brian, especially in the current climate of high unemployment.
For four years, he worked happily making log fires at Bruggers Industries – until the factory closed down in 1987.
The company had employed five deaf people while in operation.
He worked for a stint at Printpac; then the brushmaker Artel Industries employed him.
However, the latter only lasted a month as his inability to hear the machines put his safety at risk.
The company ceased his employment after a one month trial.
“The risk of injury to Brian,” they said, “was too great.”
The family now survives on a “friendly” Social Welfare grant.
“That’s why he’s not very happy,” says Cushla.
Despite the downfalls there are plenty of good times – and Cushla reckons deaf people are one up on hearing people when it comes to parties and socialising.
“Do you know about the telephone?” she asks, face lit up. “No, I answer.”
“Well, when hearing people go out to a party or the pub or something, they don’t talk so much because they talk on the telephone. But deaf people don’t use the phone, so when they go to a party they talk a lot more. Deaf people talk a lot,” she says with a grin.
Some deaf people have telephone printers (a phone you can type messages through) but the Henry’s haven’t invested in one because there aren’t that many deaf people in Levin to communicate to in this way, and it’s also too expensive to install a connection to Cushla’s friends in Napier.
Brian would not be able to use it anyway. “He’s not experienced at typing. He doesn’t know the words.”
The worst thing about being deaf, says Cushla, “is when people talk to me and I feel I can’t understand. I have to tell people to speak slowly and face to face, and try again to talk”.
Brian “sometimes doesn’t understand and feels he can’t be bothered, so he will turn and talk to someone else. He sometimes has to write things down on a piece of paper”.
The frustrations are plenty and stress is often suffered – for want of understanding or being understood – by those of us in the hearing world.
- TV/Media
