Saturday 17 January 2009

Saturday 17th January 2009 - CI users who use BSL social meet up

Today a group of us who are profoundly deaf from birth, grown up in the Deaf World and use BSL and all implanted as adults at my cochlear implant centre met up in a coffee bar. This was the first time all of the BSL cochlear implant users (except one) met up together from our CI Centre implanted as adults. We did also have someone with us who is thinking about having a cochlear implant who also grown up in the Deaf World so our social meet up was useful for her too. It was brilliant as we all realised that we all have exactly the same experience and we were able to share and compare notes and experiences and ask each other questions.. have you experienced this or that and also compare our speech and language session exercises and we all knew what the other was talking about, how long was it before you heard that etc etc. It was so confident building and it helped all of us although we were at different stages it really helped to understand what we were going through as we were coming from the same angle -been profoundly deaf all our lives and we all grew up in Deaf World and we couldn't stop signing/talking about our experiences. We are looking forward to our next meet up as we had plenty to talk about.

2 comments:

  1. want one set in in Derby!! this is useful for everyone, not just people who have implant.. also for parents who have questions about their deaf child - they want know what can their child hear.

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  2. Hi Debs, I agree - get networking and go for it! Good luck though. Yes, sometimes I go to the Parent Place on the NDCS website as sometimes there are parents of cochlear implant children asking questions about cochlear implants and school sometimes I reply and they find us a very useful resource as we been though the education system with profound deafness and we have cochlear implants as adults and understand the learning process.

    Let us know how you get on.

    Cheers

    Anna

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