Hello All -
While my wife "Daisy" has never been in the chats herself, "Snickers the Clown" and I have spoken about her often. She has been getting increasingly irritable for some time, and couldn't figure out why. She finally realized that her hearing has been going for some time, and it's been harder and harder to filter out background noise; being in public has been constant painful noise, and so it has been unpleasant for her to be in malls and supermarkets and such.
Now that she has realized, it has been easier to adjust. A screening has shown that she has lost 20% of her hearing in one ear and 50% in the other. She has been wearing earplugs to cut down on the noise, and she can still hear when people speak directly to her. It turns out that this is hereditary, but it was never identified before. Her father had scarlet fever about this age, and her brother fell off of a roof, and so the hearing loss was attributed to these things. We figure that it's not going to get better, and so we're all learning ASL (American Sign Language).
She's a silent clown anyway, so that won't affect things much. We're actually looking forward to being able to clown bi-lingually. We just needed to be able to tell people what we are going through. We feel very close to you clowns.
