Being a Woman With Hearing Loss on IWD

Today is March 8^th – International Women’s Day (IWD). It’s also my birthday and it doesn’t matter how old I am. OK I’ll tell you – I’m 68.

A 68-year-old woman with profound hearing loss: there are some who might consider such a person as to be elderly and disabled. And there was a time in my distant past when I probably would have thought the same thing.

Except now that I’m here – 68 years old, living with a condition that deeply affects many areas of my life – I realize that I’m more vital and capable and full of hope than at any previous point in my life. I live in hope that in spite of the pandemic and the horrors playing out in Ukraine, we can keep moving forward to better lives, better health, a better world.

As a woman in Canada, I enjoy rights and privileges that my grandmother Lovette, as a young woman in 1922, had just started to glimpse as possible for women. But if she had been living with a severe hearing loss such as mine, things would have been very different for her. There was almost no hearing technology. Her intelligence might have been extremely under-recognized and she would not have had the same education. She would never have become the teacher and preacher  she did in her 30s.

But then again, maybe she would have. Lovette fought for what she believed in and I like to think that deafness would not have stopped her. She died when I was 12 but she has always been one of my heroes.

Today, on International Women’s Day, I am thinking of the women in hearing loss who are also my heroes. Their names may not ring bells with you, but I’m telling you who they are anyway, starting with the amazing Rowena Fothergill who fitted me with my first hearing aid. She told me to “go out there and hear!” (A little more information would have been helpful, but she told me what she knew.)  

Decades later, when I finally reached out for hearing help from other people with hearing loss, the women of the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association raised me up and supported me: Joan Miller, Cindy Gordon, Lynn Wheadon, and my muse, the incomparable Myrtle Barrett. My fierce writing partner and friend, Shari Eberts, and our circle of Victorious women.

The women hearing care professionals I have worked, my friends, continue to take my breath away with their passion for hearing health: Joanne Deluzio, Anne Follows, Anne Griffin, Regitze Willemoes, Juliette Sterkens…and so many more.

Today, partly because of all these women, I’m proud to stand up as a woman with hearing loss.

Tomorrow is National Get Over It Day (I’m not kidding) and IWD will be yesterday. But I will still have hearing loss and I will keep writing about it, advocating for understanding and access for other women like me. And there are thousands of women doing the same thing.

Happy International Women’s Day!