I Interviewed A Former Babysitter Of Mine - 1212 Words

For this assignment, I interviewed a former babysitter of mine, DL. DL is 25 years old and is deaf. She has a hearing aid and a cochlear implant. I reached out to her on Facebook and asked her if I could interview her for the assignment; I sent her the list of questions and she sent the answers back to me. She does not remember noticing that she couldn’t hear; her guess is that her hearing loss was from birth and very gradual, so she never noticed and thought it was normal as a kid. Her parents noticed something was off by the age of 3- she had a severe language delay, didn’t do well with verbal instruction, and was extremely quiet and shy. She does not know the cause of her hearing loss. DL finds it most difficult to hear in†¦show more content†¦She thinks the most helpful thing a person has said to her about her hearing loss came from her resource teacher (who was also part of the DHOH program). She says, â€Å"I was writing an autobiography for my homework assignment and I started it off with ‘I’m DL and I’m hard of hearing’ and my teacher gently corrected me and told me that I now had severe to profound hearing loss and was considered Deaf. It was the first time someone explained the level of my hearing loss (even though it was in simplistic terms) and it proved to be a catalyst for my Deaf identity today. â€Å" DL got her first hearing aid at 5. Her father put in the hearing aids every day when she was young until she was assigned a teacher to help her practice putting in the hearing aids. The teacher was a DHOH specialist who pulled her out of class weekly to practice how to use the hearing aid, changing batteries, and lip reading skills. She was considered a better candidate for hearing aids since she had a mild hearing loss when she was younger and not deemed a good fit for surgical intervention since hearing aids was the least invasive procedure for hearing. Eventually, DL decided to get a cochlear implant. She started to realize that her hearing loss was progressive; she went from a mild hearing loss at 33 dB to severe to profound hearing loss at 95 dB. At that time she had mostly