Is that a comment

you've heard before?

In addition

to the problems of the hearing loss itself, people with hearing loss have

to put up with a great deal of misunderstanding and misinformation about

hearing loss.

"You can

hear me when you really want to" is something that just about everyone

with a hearing loss has heard at one time or another.

One of the

problems with the statement is that there is a real deal of truth to itbut

a great deal of misunderstanding as well.

"Automatic" hearing

People with

perfectly normal hearing are able to hear and understand much of what

is around them automatically. They don't have to get help from lipreading;

they don't have to listen carefully; they don't have to stop what they're

doing. They just hear.

People with

a hearing loss don't have this luxury. If you have a hearing loss, you

have to use all your hearing powers, pay attention, use lipreading when

you can, concentrateit just doesn't happen automatically.

When you have

a hearing loss, hearing takes attention and energy, and you just can't

do it 12 or 14 hours a day.

Hearing aids

not only allow you to hear better, they also allow you to hear with less

effort and energy. But because you can't listen carefully full-time, there

are times when you don't hear as well as other times.

If you're relaxing,

if you're tired, if you're thinking about something else, you may not

understand when someone starts speaking to you. (That's why we suggest

that, when talking to someone with a hearing loss, you get the individual's

attention first.)

On the other

hand, if you're ready to hear, if you're paying attention, if you're concentrating

well, you can hear better when you really want to. You just can't do it

full-time.

Actually, people

with hearing loss are able to hear and communicate surprisingly well,

since they may be hearing, say, only 50-60 percent of the speech sounds.

But we live in a very demanding hearing world and sometimes anything less

that 100 percent is just not good enough.

If someone

tells you, "OK, I'll see you on the fifteenth," and you hear

most of it, but it comes out, "OK I'll see you on the sixteenth,"

it was not good enough to hear most of what was said.

So the next

time someone says, "You can hear me when you really want to,"

perhaps you can correct them: "No, you mean I can hear you when I

rally work at it."