Volume 29 Issue 4

HOH-LD-News
Vol. 29, Issue 4
October 28, 2006

Copyright (C) 2006 Hearing Loss Web. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents
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- Article 1: Reimagining Deafness: ALDAcon Keynote by Dr. Sanjay Gulati - Part One

- Article 2: Not Deaf Enough . . . And Not Hearing Enough

- Article 3: Cochlear Implants And Speech Skills Following Meningitis

- Article 4: Short Takes

Our advertisers make it possible for us to provide HOH-LD-News as a free service. Please let them know you appreciate their support, and please mention that you saw their message in HOH-LD-News.

- Advertisers in this Issue
First Premium Placement:
Sound Clarity, Inc.
Second Premium Placement:
Bigger Selection of Pager Cases and Accessory Items at Harris Communications
Fourth Premium Placement:
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Classified Section:
Two Online Stores and Two Employment Opportunities

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Contact information and disclaimers are at the end of this newsletter.
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- Article 1: Reimagining Deafness: ALDAcon Keynote by Dr. Sanjay Gulati - Part One
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Editor: One of the great things about ALDAcon is hearing people's stories about hearing loss and how they deal with it. Dr. Sanjay Gulati has a very interesting hearing history and a seasoned and perceptive perspective on his hearing loss.

This is part one of three parts.

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Welcome by ALDA President Kathy Keefe

We always have ALDAcon in autumn, which is the season of change. During autumn, nature is preparing itself for a season of sleep. Here at ALDAcon 2006, we're not going to sleep! We're going to raise the heat and show the light!

We have a full agenda scheduled, including workshops, exhibits, and lots of great meals!

On Friday night we'll have a panel discussion with the CEOs of three of the prominent hearing loss organizations:
Nancy Bloch of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD)
Terry Portis of the Hearing Loss Association of America
Claude Stout of TDI

We also have Dr. Hurwitz from NTID, who will speak on Saturday. And marriage and family counselor Dr. Lucy Miller will be speaking today at lunch, asking the rhetorical question, where do I fit in? We also will hear from Bill Graham, one of the co-founders of ALDA. Everyone will enjoy his presentation, but I think it will be especially enlightening for newcomers.

Technological advances and improved public attitudes towards people with hearing loss are two of the changes we've seen in the past 20 years. People used to hide the fact that they were signing; they used to hide the fact that they used hearing aids. That's all changing, not only for people with hearing loss, but for people with all disabilities.

We have a great local program in Boston, in which people with various disabilities speak to kids in elementary school, and programs like that have done a lot to turn things around. As you all know, the biggest roadblock for people with disabilities is not the disability itself, but rather the attitudes of the public. That's what we need to change.

I'm reminded of the great TV program "Cheers". The opening line talks about a place "where everyone knows your name". That's a perfect description of ALDA. If I don't yet know your name, please come up and introduce yourself.

Now, proceeding directly to the heat and light portion of today's program, here's Dr. Jane Schlau to introduce today's speaker!

Speaker Introduction by Dr. Jane Schlau

Our Plenary speaker is Dr. Sanjay Gulati, who has been a very important person in my life. He is a child psychologist and has an impressive history of working with people with hearing loss. But he is about much more than his credentials. We had dinner last weekend and we discussed the presentations we were preparing for this conference. We also did a lot of emailing back and forth. He emailed me the title he had chosen for his presentation - "Reimagining Deafness". I really like that title, because it says so much about our journey in deafness. It is my great pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Sanjay Gulati.

Dr. Sanjay Gulati

I'd like to start today by talking about some of the signposts of disability.

Denial

This is only my second ALDAcon. My hearing loss was identified when I was 20, and I spent my 30s and 40s working out a new life that included dealing with my hearing loss. It has continued to progress. Four years ago I gave up using the telephone. Three years ago I began using interpreters for meetings involving more than one non-signing person. Yet last year was my first ALDAcon.

Why did I avoid ALDA during all those years? Because I was in denial. Just as I denied that being fitted with hearing aids was the reason for my sudden improvement in school performance.

Television producer Richard Cohen claims to be an expert in denial. He has multiple sclerosis (MS), and he long relied on a form of denial to continue to work. He started giving up his denial when he began using a cane. He thought of it as a "neon statement of vulnerability". But it also meant that the unspoken lie had evaporated. Denial had taken him so far, and now he would have to rely on reality. He was surprised to learn that some of his neighbors, seeing him sway and fall all those years, thought he was an alcoholic.

Cohen started me on an odyssey to learn about other disabilities. There are probably many people in this audience who have other disabilities in addition to hearing loss.

Loss

The next signpost is loss. Denial is used to protect us from having to face our loss. It's painful to finally give up the denial and accept the loss. After my hearing loss diagnosis I continued my medical studies and refused to look at the effect hearing loss would have on my medical career. I realized I had to do something when I released an asthmatic girl to go home from the hospital, because she was no longer having trouble breathing. It turns out she was having trouble, but I couldn't hear her wheezing!

I felt trapped by my hearing loss.

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- Article 2: Not Deaf Enough . . . And Not Hearing Enough
by Wendy Cheng
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Editor: I've been following rather closely what's happening at Gallaudet and trying to understand the arguments on both sides. I've also posted a lot of the information to our website (http://www.hearinglossweb.com/Issues/Identity/gal06/gal06.htm). But I've cut back on the website posting lately, because there really isn't much new happening. One bright exception to that statement is an article by Wendy Cheng. She was a student at Gallaudet about 20 years ago, and offers a unique perspective on what's happening there.

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Some 20 miles away in suburban Maryland, I'm watching the student protest at Gallaudet University from afar with a feeling of immense sadness. The Gallaudet I see on television is not the one I experienced as a special student some 20 years ago.

In the fall 1986, against my parents' dire warnings, I left the comfort of home in North Carolina to study at Gallaudet. I was tired of the lonely road I traveled then as a hard of hearing person who had fallen in love with sign language, and realized signed English, at least, made it easier for me to lipread others. My social life through 12 years of public school and four years at one of the best public universities in the nation had been mostly sterile and devoid of color. Even with the residual hearing and the hearing aids I had, I experienced audism on several levels. Well meaning hearing people doubted my ability to major in music or audiology; and I had became acutely aware my signal to noise requirements was much higher than what most parties in hearing society provided. It did not matter to me if the majority of the hearing community did not sign. The bottom line: I had no role model for the life I knew I would be leading for the rest of my life. Plus, I needed to see for myself how the "other side" lived.

And so, I arrived on campus, lived at Peet Residence Hall for one semester, took a full load of classes and worked in the English computer lab. I interacted with all kinds of students: the friendly graduate students, both deaf and hearing; placed my hands in the hands of deaf-blind students to talk with them via tactile signing; graded papers in the English computer lab and helped a deaf international student from Taiwan learn both American signs and written English simultaneously. Best of all, I joined a support group for hard of hearing undergraduates with similar educational and signing backgrounds as I, who were dealing with the same identity issues I was facing at that time.

For the first time in my life, I felt validated as a hard of hearing person and I had my own place in this community with a wide spectrum of hearing loss. Gallaudet to me was like a rainbow of many colors and that was great to experience. This was something I had not been able to find through 16 years of schooling in hearing society. That is why to this day, I cherish my all-too-brief stay at Gallaudet University as one of the major highlights of my life.

However, Gallaudet was not exactly the perfect utopia I dreamed about---at least, not musically. I faced culturally Deaf students who constantly signed the pejorative insult that I was a "think-hearing" person. When I arrived on campus, I already knew I loved classical music and that was a non-negotiable part of me. In fact, my violin came with me. About once a week, I would surreptitiously go into one of the classrooms in the library to play Pachelbel's Canon in D on the violin and other favorite pieces. I was saddened by the fact that the few deaf students on campus who had been string players in their secondary school years were denying this part of their identity in an effort to fit in with "in" group.

Watching the protest via television reports and reading posts in the deaf and Deaf blogosphere, I am saddened to see how much more polarized the campus has become since I left. If the culturally deaf students have their way and a culturally deaf president (opposing cochlear implants and the use of hearing technology) was ever selected, the rainbow I experienced so well during my stay might well disappear. However, based on accounts I've read, Jane Fernandes, the incoming president, has not been very adept at explaining her decisions to the student community. I was surprised to read that she eliminated a popular music/performing arts program (at the cochlear implant center for young children on the campus) without fully explaining to the staff why it was necessary to eliminate the program....

It is truly a messy situation.

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- Article 3: Cochlear Implants And Speech Skills Following Meningitis
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Editor: The more researchers study the use of cochlear implants (CIs) in children, the more convinced they become that CIs are very effective, and that the earlier a child receives his CI, the better. Here's a confirming study on children who contracted Meningitis.

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A major research study funded by national charity Meningitis Research Foundation conducted at the Nottingham Cochlear Implant Programme has just reported in Pediatrics - the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics - on the remarkable achievements of children deafened by meningitis.

Hearing loss is the most common long-term after effect of meningitis, affecting up to one quarter of survivors, and meningitis is the biggest cause of acquired deafness in children.

The study, led by Dr Thomas Nikolopoulos, investigated long-term progress in speech skills of young children who were deafened by meningitis. These children lost their hearing very early in life, before they had learned to speak, and are so profoundly deaf that conventional hearing aids are of no use. All of them have surgically inserted cochlear implants which bypass the damaged organ of hearing (the cochlea) and directly stimulate the auditory nerve, producing a sensation of hearing.

Taking place at Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham, which has the largest children's cochlear implant centre in the UK, the project compared long-term outcomes for these children in developing spoken language abilities to the same outcomes in implanted children who were born deaf.

The outcomes, five years after cochlear implantation, revealed that most children showed remarkable progress. Most (96%) could understand common phrases without lip-reading and 73% could understand conversation without lip-reading three years after implantation, whereas none of them could do so before implantation. Whilst the children's speech was certainly improved following cochlear implantation, only 39% of the children developed very good speech skills within five years of the implant, suggesting that cochlear implantation has certain limitations or that the time period is not long enough for the children to reach their potential in this area.

The outcomes of the study support the further wide use of cochlear implants and will hopefully lead to improved cost-effectiveness of NHS funding of this procedure. But for cochlear implantation to be feasible, hearing tests are urgently needed as soon after meningitis as the child is well enough to be assessed, and certainly within 4 weeks of discharge from hospital. This is because in response to the inflammation caused by meningitis, bone may begin to grow in the inner ear that can make cochlear implantation impossible. The research team also stressed the need for children to be thoroughly assessed for additional disorders and difficulties, and for individually tailored training and support to be present, for children to reach their full potential.

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- Article 4: Short Takes
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Editor: Here are our picks of some additional stories that you may find interesting. For more, please point your browser to: http://www.hearinglossweb.com/news/curr.htm

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Deaf Web Users Fear Being Left Behind As TV Shows Stream Onto the Internet

The Internet has been a boon to deaf computer users, giving them easy access to a wide variety of information and breaking down communication barriers. But many of those users feel left behind by one of the Internet's fastest-growing segments: online video. Though television networks and movie studios are rapidly expanding into Internet distribution, few online videos offer the closed captioning that companies are required by law to offer to TV viewers. The major networks provide full-length episodes of some of their most popular shows on the Web, including hits like "Lost" and "Survivor," but none of them include captions. Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes store sells downloads of more than 200 TV shows, but doesn't offer versions with captions, and the company's popular iPod player doesn't support them. The absence of online captions has emerged as a hot topic in the deaf community.

http://tinyurl.com/yfactt (http://online.wsj.com/article_email/
SB116137109874699183-lMyQjAxMDE2NjIxNTMyNzUxWj.html)

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Arthritis, Diabetes and Heart Disease: Connected to Sensory/Neural Hearing Loss?

Arthritis, diabetes, and heart disease are chronic medical conditions affecting millions of people in the U.S. There is on-going evidence that each is connected to sensory/neural hearing loss, which also affects millions of Americans. Audiologists should be aware of these connections when taking patient histories and conducting interviews. This article will look at the latest evidence relating arthritis, diabetes, and heart disease to hearing loss.

http://audiology.advanceweb.com/common/Editorial/Editorial.aspx?CC=77872

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Rechargeable Hearing Aids

We recently published an article about a hearing aid with rechargeable batteries that was intended for countries where frequent battery replacement is impractical. At the time I was wondering why there are no rechargeable hearing aids available in the United States. Well, it turns out there are! Magnatone has had a rechargeable hearing aid available for some time (http://www.magnatone.com/liberty.html), and Resound has just announced theirs (http://www.resoundpulse.com). It sure makes a lot of sense to me. I wonder if others will follow suit!

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- Classifieds
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Two online stores and two employment opportunity appear in this issue. (Ads appear after this brief table of contents.)

WCI. Providing Solutions for People with Hearing Loss.
15% Savings on "Treats" in October!
http://www.weitbrecht.com

Potomac Technology. Everything You Need Under One Roof.
FREE SHIPPING! A SONIC ALERT SWEEPSTAKES!
http://www.potomactech.com

Employment Opportunity 1
Various Positions
GLAD
Los Angeles

Employment Opportunity 2
Executive Director
California Center for Law and the Deaf
San Leandro, CA

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WCI. Providing Solutions for People with Hearing Loss.
15% Savings on "Treats" in October!
http://www.weitbrecht.com
-------------------

15% Savings on "Treats" in October!

WCI makes it easy to be ready for the ghosts, goblins and all the other Trick-or-Treaters at your door this Halloween! Take 15% off any of our doorbell signalers during the month of October. Choose from several signalers that will let you know when someone is at your door from the Boogeyman to Superman! Call us now at 1-800-233-9130 (V/TTY) or visit us online at http://www.weitbrecht.com (use code WCIH1006 when ordering).

To receive a copy of our WCI catalog, email sales@weitbrecht.com to request it.

WCI. Providing Solutions for People with Hearing Loss.

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Potomac Technology. Everything You Need Under One Roof.
FREE SHIPPING! A SONIC ALERT SWEEPSTAKES!
http://www.potomactech.com
-------------------

FREE SHIPPING!

A SONIC ALERT SWEEPSTAKES!

Skip the candy at Halloween this year and get your "treats" from Potomac Technology! During October you'll get FREE SHIPPING with any purchase of $100.00 or more AND your name will automatically be entered for a chance to win a Sonic Shaker SPB100 from Sonic Alert (retail value $29.95).

Call us toll free at 1-800-433-2838 (V/TTY) or visit us online at http://www.potomactech.com for details. (use code PTECH1006 for free shipping).

And to request our catalog just email us at info@potomactech.com

Potomac Technology. Everything You Need Under One Roof!

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Employment Opportunity 1
Various Positions
GLAD
Los Angeles
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GLAD is an Affirmative Action Employer with equal opportunity for men, women and people with disabilities. For more information on the following positions, please go to: www.gladinc.org. The status of all positions is: Regular, Full-time, Non-Exempt, Full Fringe Benefits unless otherwise noted. All positions are open until filled.

* Director of Human Services - Los Angeles, CA
* Community Interpreter - Riverside, CA
* Job Developer/Interpreter - Crenshaw, Norwalk and West Covina, CA
* Community Health Educator-Los Angeles, CA
* LIFESIGNS Dispatcher - Riverside, CA
* Community Relations - Los Angeles, CA
* Accounts Receivable Specialist - Los Angeles, CA

If interested for any of these positions then please submit resume and application to:

Jeff Fetterman
Human Resources Specialist
Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness, Inc.
2222 Laverna Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90041
V/TDD: (323) 550-4207
Fax #: (323)550-4204
E-mail: jfetterman@gladinc.org

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Employment Opportunity 2
Executive Director
California Center for Law and the Deaf
San Leandro, CA
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The California Center for Law and the Deaf seeks candidates for Executive Director. The position will be open as of July 1, 2007.

CalCLAD was established in 1978 and is the first and only non-profit full-service legal services corporation in America devoted exclusively to serving deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Its mission is to protect and advance their legal rights to enable them to live independent, productive lives, with full access to the rights, privileges, entitlements, services, educational and employment opportunities available to others. CalCLAD is located in San Leandro, CA, and provides services statewide.

For more information about duties, qualifications, and how to apply, please go to www.deaflaw.org or submit an inquiry to calclad@deaflaw.org.

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