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While in retirement, my fitness has steadily improved as I am triking regularly and with a number of enthusiasts periodically. One group is BARC. The other is Slow Spokes.
To belong to a group with a broad voice and influence, I joined Ashby Village - a community based in Berkeley, dedicated to helping fellow seniors.
And to explore issues regarding hearing disabilities, there exists a support and discussion group within Ashby Village, where we examine, strategize, and thereafter suggest how to help others plagued with hearing loss. Currently, our ZOOM group has been ably facilitated by fellow member, Patricia Mintz.
I would like to share with you a piece written by her.
John
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Disability Shabbat Talk
Patty Mintz
February 28, 2025
About 5 years ago, right before COVID struck, I started noticing that my conversations and phone calls were more and more punctuated by my saying “What?” a lot or, more politely “I’m sorry but could you repeat that please?” Like my parents before me, I was starting on a path of age-related hearing loss. I was 68.
I came by this loss genetically. My father had hearing issues as a young man which grew progressively more serious as he aged. My mother lost her hearing gradually starting, as mine did, in her 60s. She faced a double jeopardy of concurrently being diagnosed with macular degeneration, which ultimately left her legally blind. Both my parents were severely to profoundly deaf by their mid-70s.
While I was aware of their hearing deficits, neither my father nor my mother talked much about them. Well into my 30s and 40s, I assumed that it was just my volume that wasn’t adequate for them.
I didn’t understand that the verbal data they were getting from me was often a jumble of sounds with no meaning. It took developing my own hearing loss around the time of my mother’s death in 2019 for me to develop that insight and true empathy.
Looking back, there are some simple but important steps I could have taken to help them - now documented by Googling “talking to someone with hearing loss”.
Among the most helpful:
- Find the quietest possible space to have a conversation to eliminate
distracting background noise;.
- Face the person you’re talking to so they can lip read and also get context from your body language and gestures.
- Speak slowly and distinctly but not unusually loudly. Especially enunciate initial consonants. For me “big” and “pig” or “Jim” and “Kim" sound the same. This can lead to serious or hilarious misunderstandings.
- It also helps to have a sense of humor and an abundance of patience for both people in a conversation where one or more of the people has a hearing loss.
My parents were smart and they were stoic. They both minimized their hearing deficiencies and were very high functioning. My greatest regret is that my own experience with hearing loss came too late to have conversations with each of them about how they coped, what was most difficult, and how we could best support each other. It is what pushes me now to learn about new hearing technologies. It channels my emotions into how best to advocate for myself and help the organizations and people I care about.
And it’s why serving as a facilitator of a hearing loss support group of 10 seniors, which I’ve done since 2022, is so important to me. Our group is part of Ashby Village, a community of members and volunteers committed to helping elders maintain their independence and quality of life for as long as possible.
I had never facilitated a support group before and I was nervous. My career has been much more about health policy and planning. In the beginning, I struggled with how much to share and elicit from the group about the strong feelings that accompanied my and their hearing losses. I am not a trained therapist. But slowly as we got to know each other, I noticed that there was a common arc to our experiences.
Losing the ability to hear and understand what is being said is isolating and can be stigmatizing. Isolation and shame can lead to depression which further exacerbates isolation. I equate it to “losing your voice”.
For example, I found, as I became increasingly hard of hearing, that people would start addressing their comments to my husband Greg rather than me. Slowly I felt that I was becoming invisible and that my voice, which had served me well personally as well as professionally for most of my life, was muted.
When I shared this realization with our group there was a flash of recognition. Becoming invisible and losing our voices was one of the worst parts of living with hearing loss. We began to work together on advocacy for ourselves and each other. We shared techniques to make doctor’s appointments work better for us. We approached institutions we were members of, like Ashby Village, BerkeleyRep, and, yes, Temple Sinai. We researched the latest technologies for those of us with hearing loss.
And happily this is a golden age of audiology. Many new hearing devices are being produced for over-the-counter use. AI is now incorporated into existing and new hearing aid companies’ product lines. There has been a proliferation of translation and dictation apps. And new surgical techniques including cochlearimplants are well developed and largely successful.
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