Grandmother’s Gift of Hearing

With a career spanning five decades working with children who are deaf or hard of hearing, Jackie Brown’s personal hearing loss journey later in life still came with its own set of adjustments.

“I’d had a hearing test about 20 years ago, and noticed my hearing of high frequency pitches – such as the ‘s’ or ‘f’ sounds when someone was speaking – was gradually starting to taper off,” recalled Jackie.

For about 15 years the grandmother-of-seven happily wore hearing aids, until she started to notice these were no longer giving her enough clarity across all the sounds of speech.

“High frequency sounds really affect what you can understand, and I was struggling, particularly in noisier environments such as work meetings or when out for lunch with friends. My grandchildren were also coming along, and I found it very confronting that I was having trouble hearing their little voices,” said Jackie.

“I often think about Helen Keller who was deaf and blind, and she said that blindness cuts you off from things, and deafness cuts you off from people. That’s what I was beginning to experience.

 “I would wonder, ‘Do I really want to go out with these friends? How many of them are going? How will I cope?’ Telephone conversations, particularly those which weren’t with someone I knew or where I didn’t know the agenda, were hard. It was becoming quite stressful when someone would call and I would struggle to understand both who they were and what they were talking about.”