That’s amazing!! Is verbal speech your main language modality? What did they use for receptive hearing (devices/lip reading)?
Beautiful to hear this 🫂
I feel that. I give so much credit to my SLP & audiologist with their guidance and education in speech comprehension and pronunciation growing up as a child with severe-to-profound post-lingual hearing loss.
Without nostr:npub1ymt2j3n8tesrlr0yhaheem6yyqmmwrr7actslurw6annls6vnrcslapxnz's SLP profession, I would’ve been stuck with having to either communicate via dry-erase marker and white board, very slurred deaf-speak, or learn to sign in ASL limiting myself to a small, isolated community within my hometown.
We’ve come a long way!
Discussion
Yes,100% verbal speech all the way. I was fitted with bilateral BTE hearing aids in which helped both my parents to nurture me in a verbal speech environment. Somewhere along the line, I started lip-reading (which helped my pronunciation) and using touch of others’ vocal cords to adjust my volume level in certain areas (church, movie theatres, noisy restaurants, etc).
Doing all of this helped me work well alongside my peers in mainstream K-12 education & dispel any reasons to be on the Special Education track or Schools for the Deaf programs.
Ironically, I was fitted with a FM amplification system in the classroom to help me listen to my teacher better without background noises, but it led me to depend greatly on lip-reading with my peers since I wasn’t able to switch from the FM system to my hearing aids at a whim. 5 years of that in elementary school, I kicked off my IEP/504 plan and went completely mainstream as a highly proficient lip-reader and never looked back.
Wowwww that’s a huge success story🥰
That’s amazing you were able to maintain full general education and were exposed to good strategies/as much access to sound from the beginning.
Luckily those FM systems are now blue tooth with the hearing aids so kids with hearing loss can easily switch