well, that was cool
Med-El, the manufacturer of my CIs, has a forum on their website for CI recipients, and potential CI recipients. It's mostly people who've been implanted with Med-El products, but a lot of people who've just learned that they're candidates come there and ask questions, and there are a couple of people with AB or CA products as well. It's not a problem, it's all about providing people with a chance to ask questions and learn how others dealt with the process of learning to hear this way.
And in the process, a lot of the people who post there regularly start to feel like a community. It's an international group - lots of Americans and Canadians but people from all over the EU as well, and some Australians.
A week or two ago one of the women suggested an online chat. I immediately recoiled, because anything like talking on the phone has been a source of frustration for me for most of the last twenty years. But I decided to give it a try, because I'm doing fine in the audio meetings at work, and what the heck. We used Google Meet, which has captioning functionality, and scheduled it for this morning at 8:30 (my time). There were four of us, all women - aside from me they were from upstate New York, Jamaica, and Perth, Australia.
And it worked great. I hardly had to look at the caption bar at all. We could talk and see each other over the miles, and after several years of using the online forum, it was like we knew each other already.
But imagine this: four women, all of whom are profoundly deaf, had a video/audio conversation over our computers for 45 minutes this morning. Two years ago I probably couldn't have sat in the same room with them and heard as well as I did today.
I couldn't have imagined this even three years ago.
And in the process, a lot of the people who post there regularly start to feel like a community. It's an international group - lots of Americans and Canadians but people from all over the EU as well, and some Australians.
A week or two ago one of the women suggested an online chat. I immediately recoiled, because anything like talking on the phone has been a source of frustration for me for most of the last twenty years. But I decided to give it a try, because I'm doing fine in the audio meetings at work, and what the heck. We used Google Meet, which has captioning functionality, and scheduled it for this morning at 8:30 (my time). There were four of us, all women - aside from me they were from upstate New York, Jamaica, and Perth, Australia.
And it worked great. I hardly had to look at the caption bar at all. We could talk and see each other over the miles, and after several years of using the online forum, it was like we knew each other already.
But imagine this: four women, all of whom are profoundly deaf, had a video/audio conversation over our computers for 45 minutes this morning. Two years ago I probably couldn't have sat in the same room with them and heard as well as I did today.
I couldn't have imagined this even three years ago.
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