Lockdown 1.0

2020 wasn't a great year for writing. It wasn't a great year for a lot of things, to be honest, as we all know. And 2021 hasn't started much differently either. But now that the boys are back at school, and I've found a measure of brain space again, I'm going to try and be intentional about consolidating my jottings from 2020 into something resembling a coherent blog post - or two or three.

A lot has changed in the last 14 months.  I'll need to start at the beginning, even if it's not easy to remember that far back.  My last blog post was 10th January 2020, and I said "I'm looking forward to what 2020 brings!". How little I knew then what would unfold over the coming months... 2020 was a difficult year for so many, and I don't want to minimise that.  And we had a few challenges of our own, too, particularly with homeschooling. But what stands out for me when I look back at 2020, is the positive journey I took with my CI, which has been inextricably linked with the pandemic.  The pandemic has forced many of us out of our comfort zones, and that has been just as true for me with my hearing, in a number of ways related to communication - learning to communicate over a distance, developing communication strategies at home, and communicating online.

Schools closed in England on 20th March 2020, and suddenly everyone was keeping their distance from anyone not in their household.  The official guidance was two metres, but in those early days many were opting for three, or even four metres, depending on space available. Now, distance from the source of a sound is critical for hearing with hearing aids. Before my CI, I liked to be really close to anyone talking to me - while still respecting personal space! One metre, or less, was ideal. Anything more than one metre, and the volume really drops off. I'd be leaning forward, straining to hear (no wonder my posture is terrible!), and relying very heavily on lipreading to follow what's being said. So when you're suddenly told to stay 2m+ from everyone not living with you, that's a huge deal for a hearing aid user. Isolating, tiring, daunting, impossible really, to try and have conversations with your neighbours.  But with a CI? It was a game changer.  With a CI the volume doesn't seem to drop off until about 1.5-2m distance, and even then, not nearly as noticeably as with a hearing aid.  It made it so much easier to talk to neighbours, or others we encountered on our allotted one hour of daily exercise.  Especially when I was already feeling tired and not up to working hard on lipreading.

Lockdown 1.0 was exhausting for me.  I had a nap every single day without fail.  The boys played on their own after lunch, listening to an audiobook (David Walliams' Elevenses was a great find!) while I went upstairs and conked out on the bed for half an hour.  It is relentless having two little people talking at you nonstop.  Especially when you need to lipread too. Even more so when one of them is an unstoppable chatterbox! But I am sure it would have been more exhausting one year earlier, before my CI, when understanding people required so much more concentration.  I realised some boundaries were needed, and so sometimes I had to tell the boys to stop talking to me for 10 minutes, just so I could get something done.  I think this was when C first started literally counting down the time - he'd stand there next to me, counting how many seconds I was making him wait! (Something he still does sometimes, even now...)  Another coping strategy I started using, at Stuart's suggestion, was to practice listening to my little people without looking at them.  This was difficult for them to understand. ("But Mummy you're always saying you need to see us when we talk to you. Why aren't you looking at me now?") But it gave me listening practice. It gave me the chance to actually finish chopping the vegetables, trying to listen as I did so, without having to stop every 10 seconds to lipread the latest little person bulletin being fired my way. It didn't always work.  But sometimes it did, and each little success gave me confidence to try again.  At other times I also noticed I was hearing more of what R&C were saying to each other. I could watch them playing a metre or two away, and by a combination of lipreading and my improved hearing, would follow some of their conversation.  I never knew before just how much nonsensical dialogue two little boys can churn out between them! Especially when the BFG is the current favourite bedtime story, with all its made up words inspiring ever more fantastical word inventions - combined with the American kids TV show Blaze, with inventions such as a 'boot-machine' - leading to much role play revolving around this fun imaginary gadget...  

One experience that has been pretty much universal in 2020 has been the massive increase in time spent on video calls to keep in touch with family and friends. Before lockdown 1.0 I avoided video calls like the plague. And for the first six weeks of lockdown 1.0 I continued to avoid them. I hoped we wouldn't be locked down for too long, so that I'd not have to use them more than I had to. (With the benefit of hindsight we know that was wishful thinking!) This was one area of life where I didn't seem to be seeing much benefit from the CI.  If I was on a call with one, or maybe two other people (so prayer triplet was OK!) I found that I could just about follow what was being said, particularly if the video was clear and close up for lipreading. It was tiring though. But with group conversations it was impossible to follow, as the conversation jumped from person to person, each with differing video and audio quality affecting the clarity of their speech. It was too frustrating, and a few calls ended in tears. In mid-April we discovered Google Meet, with its live automatic captions, which was a real sanity saver, and I started to use Google Meet wherever possible, but Zoom dominated the video-calling scene, due to the breakout room options, and so there were some calls where I had no choice but to sit through them with only a vague understanding of what was being said, or with my kind, patient, husband repeating key points for me. In June a techy friend at Church found Otter for me, and that was one of the best discoveries of 2020 for me - and for my sister Jenny, too! Otter is a programme that can be installed as an app on your phone/tablet, which automatically captions whatever it 'hears'. So I can use it for Zoom calls, phonecalls, webinars, videos - whatever audio I have that I can't understand. It has opened up a whole new world of accessibility for me. Isn't technology amazing!

I'm hoping to write another couple of blog posts, covering the two subsequent lockdowns. It may take a few weeks before these arrive, as I'm not expecting much writing to happen in the rapidly approaching Easter holidays!