When I left school

When I left school, I found employment as a laboratory assistant at Robinson and Sons Ltd, a local firm that specialized in surgical dressings and boxes.  I enrolled as a day release student at the local Technical College where I found it very tough going.  During the lectures, I found that I could not hear or understand what the lecturers were saying and often did not know what I had to do. I realised that like it or not deafness was a disability and one that is not visible and I felt cut off, unhappy and isolated. Thankfully, a few of the students began to talk to me but I was certainly the odd one out and  I found that I could not depend wholly on lip-reading and my hearing aid and that it was so easy to lose the thread of what the other students were talking about. There was one lecturer who did go out of his way to help me by giving me notes at the end of the lectures explaining what he would be talking about in the next lesson and a list of books that I should get from the library; his help was very much appreciated.  I had to spend many hours studying and making notes in order to keep up with the other students but did complete the course successfully.

 I was very happy living in the Deaf World but on entering the Hearing World, it was not long before I realised that I was not as well prepared as I would liked to have been but I do believe that it was up to me to make a success of the final transition into the hearing World though the ideal situation for me would have been to have deaf and hearing friends. I can say in all honesty that the years at the two deaf schools that I attended was a time that I felt that I really belonged to a “group” as it was and for a long time afterwards very difficult for me to really fit in with the Hearing World.  There were many times when I felt left out of group conversations and it is easy to feel lonely and isolated and I found communication and mixing in the hearing world the most difficult obstacles that I had to face. I realised that using a hearing aid alone was not enough to allow me to understand everything a hearing person was saying but by using a hearing aid and lip-reading at the same time on a one to one basis, I was able to understand most of what was being said to me providing that that they did not put their hand over their mouth making it impossible for me to lip-read them.