Deaf Awareness event at Northwick Park Hospital

Don't forget!!

Deaf awareness week is 28th June - 4th July!!

Come and see us at Northwick Park Hospital, on 1st July between 09:30 and 13:30, where we will be holding an event to promote greater awareness of deaf issues in the workplace and the local community..

See our website http://www.silent-sounds.co.uk/ for information on deaf awareness, and on many other issues regarding British Sign Language and deaf communications.

How a bout of flu (and years in noisy nightclubs) left Peter Stringfellow virtually deaf

Peter Stringfellow is not the kind of man who likes to offend. Having spent half a century gladhanding guests in his hugely successful nightclubs, image is everything to him and upsetting people is anathema.

Sometimes, however, he simply cannot help it. Such as the occasion when he was attending the Pride of Britain Awards and Tracey Emin, the enfant terrible of British art, caught him swapping her table place card with that of his wife, Bella.
'She wasn't very impressed, to say the least,' recalls the 69-year-old entrepreneur.
'Tracey was clearly under the impression i didn't want to sit next to her.
'I had to say: "whoa, calm down! I'm completely deaf in my left ear, so it would be completely pointless for you to sit there because it will ruin your night and mine."
'I think she was a bit surprised that i was so open about my deafness. But why should I be ashamed of it? It's not anybody's fault and if people can't deal with it, then it's their problem, not mine.'

Such candour is typical of a man who - courtesy of a facelift and several thousand pounds worth of dental work - looks 20 years younger than his genuine age.
With a 28-year-old wife - a former ballerina, no less - and a booming business in the youth-obsessed world of nightclubs, he exudes vigour and good health.

Engage him in conversation for longer than five minutes, however, and the reality emerges, accompanied by a dazzling flash of those pearly whites and a trademark guffaw.
'I'll be 70 in October and fully expect to live well into my 90s, but right now my body's falling apart,' he grins.
'I'm deaf in my left ear, now the other one's going, too. I've got a lazy left eye which is effectively useless and just lately I've started seeing spots in the other, which means I spend half the time looking around like I'm trying to catch a mosquito. Apparently, it's called black spot, it comes on with old age and I'm just going to have to live with it.

'So i can't hear and I can't see. oh, and I've got a dodgy knee, but I'm not going to let it get me down.'
By his own admission, the light-hearted banter is a coping mechanism. He is far too confident to be laid low by his ailments, and is speaking out to mark Deaf Awareness week in the belief he can offer hope to those in the same position.

This is a man who sat down in front of a House of Commons Select Committee inquiry into lap-dancing clubs, cupped a hand behind his ear and bellowed: 'I'm going deaf, so if you want me to hear you, please speak up.' A shrinking violet he is not. Having been in the nightclub business since 1962, standing on stage alongside the likes of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, it's no great surprise that he suffers from hearing problems.

Yet it was a flight in 1983 which first triggered the tinnitus - a constant ringing in the ear - and which has plagued him since. 'Believe me, I was suicidal about tinnitus. You're doing anything to get to sleep - drinking, whatever - eventually you manage it and then you wake up and it's still there.''I was on a plane to New York and coming down with flu,' he recalls. 'It seemed to take ages for my ears to pop and when they did I ignored the strange whooshing sound which followed.

'But when the flu went, this sound didn't. So I went to my GP, who introduced me to tinnitus and sent me to a specialist on Harley Street. 'That was the beginning of a journey which lasted two years. I went to doctor after doctor, eventually seeing this guy who sat me down and told me: "There is no cure. You've got to learn to live with it."

'Believe me, I was suicidal about it. You're doing anything to get to sleep - drinking, whatever - eventually you manage it and then you wake up and it's still there.
'My saviour was my career. My life is in nightclubs and within that environment it went. there's noise there anyway, and gradually I learned to accept it.'

Most cases of tinnitus are associated with hearing loss arising from intense sound exposure, ageing or exposure to drugs, including aspirin. It usually takes the form of a ringing noise, but in some patients it occurs as a high-pitched whining, buzzing, clicking, roaring or, as in Peter's case, whooshing sound.

Tinnitus triggered by prolonged exposure to loud noises is caused by damage to the minute hairs in the inner ear. These stereocilia vibrate in response to sound waves.

Peter, however, points at a number of potential factors besides noise - while readily accepting he was  reckless with his hearing in his youth. 'When I was a child, I had a deep ear infection,' he says. 'Then, in my 20s, I perforated my eardrum while diving off the coast of Cornwall.

But there was one occasion in about 1968 which stands out. I was on stage with the Pretty Things and stood for 45 minutes right next to the amplifier. I've never heard anything so loud, and it was days before my hearing came back. 

'I was in the prime of my life back then, chasing girls and living for the moment, and I certainly didn't think I'd done any damage. 'But we pay the price in the end, all of us.'

There is also a possible hereditary element. Peter's father, who worked in Sheffield's noisy steel mills, wore a hearing aid and Peter's son, Scott, a 42-year-old racing driver, is already experiencing hearing problems.
'I was in the prime of my life back then, chasing girls and living for the moment, and I certainly didn't think I'd done any damage.'Tinnitus, however, was only the beginning of his woes. Ever since that flight, 27 years ago, Peter's hearing has gradually deteriorated to the point when, nine months ago, he finally removed the hearing aid from his left ear and accepted that it was 'gone - basically dead'.

'I hadn't really been able to make anything out with that ear for years, but it was giving me a noise, and that gave me a sort of balance, but eventually I lost even that,' he says. 'The irritating thing is that I still have tinnitus roaring away in that ear, but nothing else.
'Since I took that hearing aid, I acquired an earpiece for the other ear - my "good" ear.
'But I'm losing the hearing in that ear, too. it's going at the top end of the register, which if you consider my profession is ironic as, in theory, it makes women's voices harder to hear.

'The worst part of hearing loss, however, was the way it affected my balance. The first time I got it I was in a restaurant and, all of a sudden, I was thrown on to the floor, as if somebody had hit me on the head with a hammer. Boom!

Jacqueline Sheldrake, the audiologist who treats Peter, describes what he endured as 'a Meniere's-like episode'.  Meniere's Disease is a condition of the inner-ear caused by fluctuations in the fluid, leading to feelings of vertigo, tinnitus and progressive hearing loss.
Adds Peter: 'It was years before it went away. I was tripping over things all the time - all because of my hearing problems.

'But then, eight years ago, I met my wife, bought a boat and started to move away from my old life of being  in the club every night. 'I relax more - and it's made a huge difference. The first time I walked off my boat, I recall thinking, "there's something different." Then I realised the dizziness had gone.'

Peter put it down to stress - something tinnitus is closely linked to. nevertheless, his hearing has continued to deteriorate, to the point where he is becoming increasingly reliant on his hearing aid.

He has taken advice from the Royal National Institute for Deaf People on selecting the best device for his needs. He says he is helped by the fact that in his club people tend to raise their voices to be heard, though at times he has to bluff his way through conversations. ('A lot of conversations in this business are pretty superficial anyway,' he grins).

Although his wife, who is 41 years his junior, is utterly unconcerned by his hearing loss, some changes have been inevitable.  'I can't go to the cinema, and at home I've got two big speakers on my side of the bed so I can hear the TV.

'Let's be honest here: I'm a rich man, but if I was just a regular guy I'd sell my car or miss my summer holiday if it meant I could afford to have this hearing aid. It's that important.'  Sadly, I cannot go to big concerts any more, either - it's just too loud. I am also very careful with the hearing I have left.

'Every time I go swimming, I use an antiseptic spray in my ears to make sure I don't get an infection. The irony is not lost on me that I can't go to a disco, and I'm the guy who introduced them to this country!'
Now, Peter would never consider going without the aid - a Widex PA115 which is all but invisible in his ear and retails at around £1,800.

He is evangelical about the issue of deafness, insisting that he has no compunction about telling people he is deaf and asking them to speak up. 'I hate mumblers and get great satisfaction from telling them it's their fault, not mine.

'I want people to look after their hearing because once it's gone that's it. And for people like myself, for whom it's too late, they have to remember it's not their fault.

'Don't be frightened of it and, for God's sake, don't be ashamed, either.'
Deaf Awareness Week, rnid.org.uk.

Sir Michael Parkinson "The Deaf are discriminated against"

Sir Michael Parkinson is still haunted by the isolation experienced by his grandparents, who were both profoundly deaf. The chat-show host says we must all do more to help the hard of hearing.

As a boy growing up in a South Yorkshire pit village, Sir Michael Parkinson would sit and play dominoes with his redoubtable grandparents after school. There was very little else he could share with them – no family anecdotes, no wartime memories, no tales from school – because they were profoundly deaf.

"They had no connection with the outside world," he says. "The sadness was that my grandfather was a fascinating character but you couldn't get to him. They were so cut off by their affliction that my grandmother used to talk to herself. My grandfather would cheat terribly, putting threes against fives, twos against sixes, because she was too busy nattering to herself to notice.

"She'd cry: 'I don't know how he keeps on winning.' And that was about all she said. They had little communication one to the other. Deafness imprisoned them in a silent and solitary world. It was very odd because you were with them but not included in that silent world. My father was always slightly deaf, and became more and more so as time went on. It was a cruel thought, but I remember hoping he would never look like that because I did not want him to be embarrassed. I had a fear that he would be compromised when I wasn't there to help out."

Sir Michael Parkinson's closeness to his father, Jack, a miner, sharpened his sensibility to the stigma of deafness. "It is a very excluding condition, no matter how much you try to integrate. A blind or a disabled person walking into a room commands instant sympathy but a deaf person is at a huge disadvantage. The conspicuous old hearing aids were a kind of declaration that a person was not only deaf but dim as well. Something of that lingers on. The deaf are discriminated against in all sorts of ways. We need to reduce the difficulties they face in their daily lives."

Though he has not inherited the genetic deafness on his paternal side, Parkinson has been brought face to face with the consequences of deafness at intervals all his life. Several of his father's 12 siblings were deaf. In Australia in the Eighties, he wrote a series of children's books called The Woofits for the NSW Institute for Deaf and Blind Children, and has remained a hands-on ambassador for their work with deaf and disturbed children. More recently, when someone close to him was born deaf, he became involved with the Royal National Institute for the Deaf and is promoting their Deaf Awareness Week, which begins today.

One in seven people in Britain suffers from the "invisible disability". Almost nine million are deaf or hard of hearing, and another 2.3 million have mild or moderate deafness. Nearly 42 per cent of the over-50s have some kind of hearing loss. Two million people wear hearing aids and another four million would probably benefit from one. About 840 babies are born deaf each year in the UK, and one in 1,000 is deaf at three years old. Extreme deafness is associated with old age, but most people develop it during their working lives – with all the encroaching limitation that implies.

It is a desperately isolating condition, made worse by society's lack of understanding and the slowness of businesses to adapt. "People with glasses are accepted but there is a stigma attached to hearing aids," says David Runcorn, whose genetic deafness, exacerbated by clay-pigeon shooting when he was young, became a serious disability when he was 54. "People think if you struggle to understand what's being said you are stupid – hence the slogan 'deaf not daft'. On occasions, I have asked someone a question and they have given the answer to my wife. This is annoying and hurtful.

"I've found that when you tell people you are hard of hearing – it's better to say 'deaf' – it just doesn't register. You say: 'Look at me and speak slowly.' They don't. Even those who should know better. In hospital recently, a doctor looked at my notes and turned away as she spoke. I couldn't hear a word. There is a long way to go in educating people."

Just how far is highlighted by the RNID in its multi-pronged campaign to normalise life for the deaf, at work and at play. It is an affront to basic courtesy, and woeful customer relations, that banks, building societies, post offices and other public places advertise induction loop systems that either don't work or aren't switched on. A common experience is that if the loops are turned off, the person behind the glass screen has no idea – much less interest in – how to turn them on.

The blizzard of incomprehensible announcements at airports and train stations is literally painful for deaf people. Without visual information, they are lost. Few cinemas bother with subtitles. The National Theatre is exceptional in its dedication to caption performances and sign-language interpreters, but only a handful of other theatres makes regular provision for the hard of hearing.

"Every business can and should do simple but vital things to make the lives of people who are deaf or hard of hearing easier," says Chris White of the RNID.

The charity is leading a campaign to save and extend lip-reading classes. In some areas, there are no classes at all. In others, fees are rising and classes closing because people cannot afford them. Some that were either free or a token £10 a term have increased to £200 for a 30-week course. If ever there was a case for a countrywide free service, funded by local authorities, it must be this.

"These classes mean more to people than simply lip-reading," says Runcorn. "They also function as a support group. We can joke about our shortcomings and difficulties and so feel less isolated. In my lip-reading class, I have seen people in tears of frustration."

This year, the RNID is launching new research into the effect of hearing loss on relationships. The strain of becoming chief interpreter for a deaf partner, of not being able to enjoy the cinema, theatre or lectures together, and of watching your once vibrant social life shrink to suppers with two understanding friends, can be acute.

It cost Jeanette Wright, who became deaf after a sinus infection when she was only 33, her marriage and most of her friends. After two years locked away in self-pity, she went on to train as a sign-language teacher and start a new life as a deaf awareness instructor with her own company. This year she is delivering deaf awareness training at Buckingham Palace; last year it was Windsor Castle.

"Sometimes the dark makes the world a lonely place," she admits, "because it's only in the light that I can communicate. But the only things I really miss, 24 years on, are music and the sound of my grandsons laughing. They are both trying to learn sign language with me.

"The other week, we went to see Dreamboats and Petticoats with stage text. It was great. I could laugh along with the hearing people without feeling stupid, because I knew what everyone else was laughing at."

Like many deaf people, Wright, who lives in Colchester, developed a pride in her condition. She was told that a cochlear implant might help, but she didn't want one. "The only real problem," she says, "is people who aren't deaf-aware who tend to ignore you out of fear or embarrassment. And happily, it's my job to train them to communicate with me."

Michael Parkinson is supporting Deaf Awareness Week (RNID.org.uk), which runs until July 4.

To all NHS Procurement managers, we can help you to save money!!

To all NHS Procurement managers, we can help you to save money!!

In the tough economic situation we find ourselves in, it is important that we all do what we can to make sure that our budgets are being directed in the most productive way.

Silent Sounds UK Ltd are very aware of how difficult things are in the health service, and we have come up with some special measures to try to help NHS Trusts and PCT's save money on their interpreting services.

Please visit our website http://www.silent-sounds.co.uk/  for information on how we are trying to help to reduce costs, whilst still offering the highest quality British Sign Language (BSL) and other deaf communication services.

reminder-Deaf awareness week

 

Don't forget!!

Deaf awareness week is 28th June - 4th July!!

Come and see us at Northwick Park Hospital, where we will be holding an event to promote greater awareness of deaf issues in the workplace and the local community..

See our website http://www.silent-sounds.co.uk/ for information on deaf awareness, and on many other issues regarding British Sign Language and deaf communications.

RNID trumpets 'own goal' warning for World Cup fans

RNID is calling on football fans at the World Cup to defend themselves against the risk of temporary tinnitus or permanent hearing damage posed by the noisy vuvuzela plastic trumpets which are popular with South African supporters.

..The largest charity in the UK working on hearing loss is concerned about people over-exposing themselves to potentially damaging levels of sounds during the tournament. A vuvuzela just behind you will hit you with more than 125 decibels of sound, which will really hurt your ears and, when added to hours of partying with loud music, can cause permanent hearing loss over time according to the World Health Organisation.

RNID's Senior Audiology Specialist, Angela King, says; "Football fans are running the risk of tinnitus – ringing, whistling, humming or buzzing in their head or ears – or permanently damaging their hearing if they don't tackle the cumulative effects of exposure to loud volumes from vuvuzelas and music during the World Cup.

"Noise over 85 decibels can cause damage over time. Vuvuzelas produce levels with more than five times that damage potential so we're urging supporters to ensure they don't score an own goal for their hearing and wear reusable earplugs in stadia and when partying in pubs, clubs and football festivals."

Trevor Moody, a 27-year-old Londoner, is taking earplugs to protect his hearing during England's World Cup adventure. Trevor says: "I've already lost some hearing through an infection in one of my ears and really value my hearing as a result. Those vuvuzela trumpets sound like they won't be doing my hearing any favours so l'll be wearing earplugs to protect myself and safely enjoy the party atmosphere in the stadia and, hopefully, all the celebrations in pubs and clubs as England progress!"

Would you like to learn BSL?

Would you like to learn

British Sign Language?

We are now offering a two day course which will increase your understanding of the Deaf community, Deaf culture and the fourth official language of the U.K, British Sign Language.

You will learn:

·        About the people who use BSL

·        The ‘Two’ handed finger spelling alphabet

·        A full range of useful BSL phrases

·        How to work with other Language Service   Professionals

This course is extremely interactive and is very much a “hands on” course were you will learn in a fun

Environment, by means of games, questions and answers and lots of practice.

This course assumes no prior knowledge and is perfect for total beginners.

After this course you will be able to progress to BSL Level 1 or Level 1 Certificate in Developing Awareness & Communication with Deaf and Deafblind people.

Next course runs on 19^th and 26^th June, 10:00 hrs – 16:00 hrs

(World Cup friendly, does not conflict with England Matches!!)

For more information please call   01494 796 030

Check our website www.silent-sounds.co.uk 

or e-mail info@silent-sounds.co.uk

Would you like to learn British Sign Language?

Would you like to learn British Sign Language?

We are now offering a two day course which will increase your understanding of the Deaf community, Deaf culture and the fourth official language of the U.K, British Sign Language.

You will learn:
• About the people who use BSL
• The ‘Two’ handed finger spelling alphabet
• A full range of useful BSL phrases
• How to work with other Language Service Professionals

This course is extremely interactive and is very much a “hands on” course, where you will learn in a fun Environment, by means of games, questions and answers and lots of practice.
This course assumes no prior knowledge and is perfect for total beginners.

After this course you will be able to progress to BSL Level 1 or Level 1 Certificate in Developing Awareness & Communication with Deaf and Deafblind people.

Next course runs at our High Wycombe training centre,
on 19th and 26th June, 10:00 hrs – 16:00 hrs
(World Cup friendly, does not conflict with England Matches!!)

For more information please call 01494 796 030
Check our website www.silent-sounds.co.uk
or e-mail info@silent-sounds.co.uk

8 Month old Baby Hears for First Time!!

8 Month old Baby Hears for First Time!!


Baby Jonathan was deaf from birth, but received a cochlear implant at 8 months. The way his expression changes when the device is turned on and he hears his mother’s voice for the first time is just beautiful. His father videotaped the moment.
Truly amazing.