One of the biggest challenges of hearing loss is not understanding what’s being said – especially if it’s being said in an emergency.
Like a bank robbery.
Being in the bank during a robbery is my all-time worst nightmare. I fixed that potential problem by doing my banking online. Still, occasionally I do need to go the actual bank.
Everybody worries a bit about being caught in dangerous crossfire (although hopefully not in the nail salon where I have an appointment this week), but at least ‘hearing’ people can understand what the bad people are saying! I don’t mean to start a pissing contest, as in “I’m in more danger than you” – but I am! Not understanding what’s being screamed at me by nervous people with weapons is very dangerous.
In the opening monologue of my performance piece, Unheard Voices, a woman in a noisy bar reacts to a stranger’s suggestion that hearing loss is no big deal.
“…Excuse me? Did you just say, ‘what’s the big deal’?
Oh, It’s not like this is ‘serious’ or ‘fatal’ or anything like that. Really.
How would you know? What if I was walking down the street
and didn’t hear the car coming up behind me? Isn’t THAT serious?
Or – what if I was in the bank and these robbers come in
with huge automatic weapons and they make everybody lie down
on the floor and one of the bad guys, waving his gun at us, says,
‘I’m gonna shoot anybody who stands up!’ But all I hear is –
‘STAND UP!’ Think about it – wouldn’t you say that could be FATAL?
So don’t talk to me about ‘serious’, because you just don’t know.”
Should this ever happen, my fallback strategy is to copy what everyone else does. But how, if we’re lying face down, hands over our heads, could I see what the next person over is doing? Best just to avoid eye contact with anyone and stay face down until I hear a kind voice saying, maybe, “It’s the police, ma’am. Are you dead? If not, you can get up now.”
A version of this nervous nightmare happened to my friend Beth Wilson.
Beth was in a restaurant parking lot talking with her partner Tina and another woman. She and Tina have hearing loss and the third person was ‘hearing’, a sign language interpreter. A car drove into the parking lot and approached them with the front passenger window rolled down. Beth thought they were going to ask for directions.
“I didn’t see the gun stuck out the open window because I was trying to lipread the speaker”, said Beth. “I couldn’t really hear him—and I was distracted by the hearing person fleeing the scene. Tina was frozen, holding her hands up in the air like the Tin Man. As I turned back, the passenger guy was now out of the car and waving the gun around at us, shouting instructions that I couldn’t understand. Since the sign language interpreter was now hiding under my pickup truck, this had definitely become an inaccessible robbery. I couldn’t lipread him because he was moving the gun in front of his face. I told him repeatedly that we were hard of hearing and couldn’t understand him and didn’t want anyone to get hurt.
He finally walked over and took Tina’s purse—plucked it off her shoulder and down over her frozen arms as if taking it off a store display. He turned to me, still waving the gun and still shouting things I couldn’t make out, although I did hear the driver yelling to hurry up. Eventually, the guy gave up; the robbery was taking too long because he had to keep repeating his threats. He jumped back into the car and they drove off.”
When Beth told me the story, I was on the floor with laughter. I could laugh because nobody got hurt and Beth is just plain funny. At the same time, we all shivered at what could have happened.
Gun holdups are, luckily, a rare event where I live in Canada. But when I do hear of it happening elsewhere, I send up a sympathetic thought’n’prayer that those being held up could hear and understand every word.
(Excerpted from my book The Way I Hear It: A Life with Hearing Loss.)
