By Katherine Bouton. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 272 pages, $26.
Reviewed by Jules Wagman
Katherine Bouton is totally deaf in her left ear and her hearing is getting progressively worse in her right. She worked for The New York Times for 22 years, eventually becoming theater editor. She heard less ——and less as time went by until a new culture editor, not among those who knew about her handicap, told her she wasn’t a “team player.”
While the Americans with Disabilities Act forbids discrimination, Ms. Bouton put herself between a rock and a hard place by not publicly acknowledging her disability. Instead, she “walked out.” She is now a regular reviewer and contributor to Science Times.
As a perceptive reporter and editor as well as an accomplished writer, Ms. Bouton studies the entire field of hearing loss, translating the jargon and medical terms into understandable everyday English.
She was 31 when her left ear suddenly went dead. She gradually regained some of the hearing but didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t know that she had a loss that was caused by a defect in the hair cells in the inner ear.
Vowel sounds give Katherine Bouton difficulty: “Bit or bet; prim or prom; life, left, loft, laughed. They’re all one to me.”
Let her describe people with moderate to severe hearing loss: They “can’t hear if they can’t see the speaker face-to-face. They can’t hear in a group. They can’t hear in an airport terminal or on a noisy street.” It’s not the lack of sound, it is the inability to translate those sounds into usable words.
Her prescription for people who deal with the hard of hearing: Speak slowly and distinctly. If you have to repeat something, use different words. Face the person you are speaking to. As the population ages, those with age-related loss increases.
Ms. Bouton points out that natural hearing includes the ability to pick out a voice or sound from a multitude, even to know the direction from which it is coming. That is lost among those with hearing loss; hearing aids still fail to sort out voices and directions.
Unlike Ms. Bouton’s loss, the most common cause of hearing loss, she tells us, is noise—noise in sports stadiums and arenas, restaurants, concerts, both rock and symphonic, but also, she notes, public address systems, television in doctors’ offices, traffic.
Cochlear implants (electronic devices which provide a sense of sound) are not the full answer. When it comes to music, “People with implants can generally hear rhythm but very few can hear pitch.” Vowel sounds give her difficulty: “Bit or bet; prim or prom; life, left, loft, laughed. They’re all one to me.”
Hearing aid costs are roadblocks for many. A set of aids can run $6,000 and very few users report that they are satisfied. The price tag and reports from friends and relatives of unsatisfactory results also keep many from acquiring hearing aids.
Lip-reading is only part of the answer. The trick to lip-reading is to know the context of the conversation. She turns to journalist Henry Kisor, who has been deaf since he was three years old. He notes that m, p, and b all look alike, as do t, d, n, and l.
Words using those letters include bat, bad, ban, mat mad, man, pat, pad and pan. “Combine that with low-frequency hearing loss where the vowel sounds fail, and they all sound alike.”
Her final example: “’When are we eating?’ my husband says. ‘Chicken,’ I answer.”
Jules Wagman has age-related and genetic hearing loss, worse in the right ear than left. He wears hearing aids and doesn’t like them.
©2014 by Jules L. Wagman
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