I drove up to Nottingham again today to go to The Ear Foundation Open Day. This was a great day. There was alot more people and I made some new friends. In the morning we went to two sessions, one for advice on communication and the other was technology. I was able to talk to a member of staff there about my bad experience the day before where at work, when we went for lunchtime drinks. During that lunchtime drink I didn't have an interpreter and it was an impossible environment for me to communicate in. I felt so frustrated with not being able to pick up one single word that I decided to played a game quietly on my mobile to try and divert my focus away from my frustration of not being able to join in. That didn't work as I could then hear them all laughing as they were sharing same jokes, and tears began to fill my eyes as I was completely unable to be part of this, no matter how hard I tried, and the harder I tried to follow, the more upset I got as I just couldn't follow at all - even on a one to one basis when someone tried to tell me what the topic was. The trouble with this pub was that it was very dark and there was an awful lot of background noise and then you have the group talk which is also an impossible communicative environment for us. Us cochlear implant users cannot separate background noise from the noise we want to focus on. One of my colleagues realised I was upset, so we went away from the group and went for a walk around town. She made me feel better and began to better understand my position in the pub. Anyway as I explained my experience to this member of staff at the Ear Foundation to get some advice on how to deal with these situations, she told me that this is a VERY common experience for cochlear implant users and that they are very very hard and virtually impossible environments for us and that we still need commmunication support in these situations.
In the afternoon at the Ear Foundation we had an interesting talk from a man from Amercia called Geoff Plant. He came to talk to us about music. What I found most interesting is the differences in enjoyment of music pre and post implant for those born hearing and for those born deaf. It was noticed that the born hearing / grown up hearing CI users enjoyed music better before their implants and that music now sound not as good whereas for the born deaf / grown up deaf group, our experience of music has greatly improved and therefore is so much more enjoyable.
I made some new friends this afternoon with others with a similar background to deafness as me and we exchanged email addresses and mobile numbers so that we can talk regularly on MSN and they also told me about CIUG yahoo group which are very places of support to compare notes in our experiences and cochlear implant journeys. Tonight I then drove from Nottingham down to London to visit my sister.
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