Now Playing: My Left Eye
It’s hard for many of us to admit that we need to use an adaptive device in order to carry on with our life. My mother resisted getting a hearing aid, which drove my sister, who was tired of shouting every other word, nearly crazy. But in the end Mom bowed to the inevitable, used two hearing aids and we no longer had to endlessly repeat ourselves to be understood.
I think that my mother was afraid that if she used hearing aids she would go from not being able to hear to being deaf; and even though there may not be much of a difference between the two, I’m sure that what she really feared had to do with making her disability a real, objective fact and not just a private, subjective experience.
After almost half a dozen operations on my left eye left me nearly unable to read print the way I normally had, my wife suggested that I try talking books. The very thought of listening to talking books made my guts twist like wet laundry. If I do that, I thought, then…I’ll be visually impaired. And people who listen to talking books don’t really read anyway, No, I thought. If I use talking books I’ll lose the ability to really read and that will be the end of me.
Maybe it was the memory of my mother that eventually changed my mind, or maybe I was just desperate enough to try anything that would get me back into the world of books and literature. At a store called Talking Book World my wife and I picked out the first book we would listen to together. It was Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, the story of people and a horse who refuse to give up in the face of adversity.
What I discovered is that the brain doesn’t care if a word is spoken or visually read. Reading a talking book is reading, just as hearing through hearing aids is hearing.
Refusing to give up is our best adaptive device.
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Posted by james-hazard
at 2:47 PM PDT
Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 6:30 PM PDT
