Matilda's employment before her deafness
From the time she left school Matilda worked as a clerk in various aspects of financial administration. When she married she continued to work full-time until she had children. She then had a break for several years.
She returned to work part-time when she was about 40, joining a large multinational food-producing company as a senior clerk in the department that controlled the company's IT budget. Her job was to match invoices to expenditure for hardware and software purchased for the company; she was one of a small administration team of four staff. Much of her work was self-contained and relied on her own personal performance; but she also had to deal with telephone enquiries from other departments in the company and to attend occasional staff meetings.
She worked a 30 hour week, six hours a day, and, although her husband worked full-time, her part-time earnings made an essential contribution to the family budget. Being well-versed in financial procedures, she enjoyed her work; but it was only one part of a varied life as wife and mother.
Ignoring the first signs of deafness
Soon after she started working for her new company, she detected the first signs of deafness. Occasionally she found herself misunderstanding instructions or mishearing telephone numbers. For two years she ignored these problems. Then she consulted her doctor who referred her to an Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) specialist. He carried out tests and confirmed that she had a slight hearing loss in both ears. His only comment was that she should learn to lipread. He offered no explanation of the causes of her hearing loss, no prognosis for the future and no information about where she could learn to lip read; so, as her hearing loss still had few repercussions on her work, she took no action on his advice.
During this period there was rapid development of computer systems at the company, and Matilda became thoroughly conversant with the latest programmes for handling financial figures (e.g. the use of Excel to provide spreadsheets). The skills that she acquired then helped her to continue doing her job well later on as her deafness became more severe.
Adjusting to moderate deafness
Gradually Matilda's deafness increased so that she began to have difficulty understanding telephone callers. She applied to her doctor again and, after waiting for nearly a year for an appointment with the hospital's audiology department, her hearing was retested, and, at the age of 47, she was fitted with her first hearing aid. She was also referred automatically to the hospital's Hearing Therapist (HT). She had to wait three months to get her first appointment but then had regular sessions with the HT about every two months.
With the HT's information and support Matilda began to take practical steps to cope with her deafness. She started attending local lipreading classes and put pressure on her firm's personnel department to buy her an amplified telephone and to install Voicemail so that instead of answering calls directly she could listen to her callers' messages, if necessary replaying them two or three times to make sure she understood them, before returning their calls. (As her hearing worsened she arranged for a colleague in her team to listen to her Voicemail and relay her callers' messages).
Because she worked in the section responsible for the firm's budgets for telephones, she could demonstrate that there was money available to meet her requests; but she still had to press hard to get the personnel department to provide what she needed.
In addition, Matilda equipped herself to communicate with people in the deaf community by learning British Sign Language (BSL). She attended classes at her own expense for a year to qualify in BSL at Stage One and then continued classes in BSL Stage Two for a further two years. This training was to prove useful to her at meetings at a later stage of her deafness (see page 89).
Adjusting to severe deafness
In the four years after she received her first hearing aid Matilda's deafness increased spasmodically, remaining stable for three to six months, then suddenly worsening within two to three days, sometimes in one ear, sometimes in the other. Her hearing was retested several times, and often she was fitted with more powerful hearing aids.
By the time that she was 51 her deafness had reached the point where she could not use the telephone at all, could gain no benefit from attending meetings and relied heavily on lipreading for one-to-one conversations. However at about this time her husband, Tony, retired. She was now the sole breadwinner, and keeping her job was more important than ever.
She had her hearing retested and for the first time was fitted with powerful hearing aids for both ears. In addition her HT recommended that she and her husband go for a residential course at the LINK Centre to help them both come to terms with her rapidly increasing deafness. Matilda approached her colleagues in the personnel department for time off to attend the course, and after some consideration the firm decided to pay for both her and Tony to attend the course.
The positive attitude adopted by the staff at the LINK Centre helped Matilda and Tony for the first time to accept the full extent of her deafness and rethink their approach to dealing with it. Instead of hiding it or apologising for it they saw the advantage in being open about it and showing their hearing friends and colleagues how they could communicate with her more effectively. Matilda and Tony were also impressed by the information provided at the LINK Centre about the wide range of audio-visual aids available for deafened people.
Back at work Matilda tried to avoid the need to answer the telephone by encouraging colleagues to contact her by email or fax, and to enable her to take part in small meetings within her department she followed up the HT's suggestion that she should apply to the Employment Service for a radio microphone through the Access to Work scheme. However, the Employment Service took more than six months to approve the purchase of a suitable radio microphone. Matilda's hearing continued to deteriorate during this period with the result that, soon after she had received the microphone, she no longer had sufficient hearing to detect the sounds which it amplified.
The impact of becoming profoundly deaf
By the age of 53, after only two years' use of her two powerful hearing aids, she could no longer gain any benefit from them: she had become profoundly deaf.
During those two years and the following two years in which she remained profoundly deaf, her situation at work changed dramatically. She concentrated on the part of her job which she could do on her own, reconciling invoices and expenditure, and withdrew from the rest of her job, which involved direct communication with other people. She was cut off from office gossip and received no feedback from meetings at which the company's performance and development were discussed unless she pressed for summaries of the information to be emailed or faxed to her. She stopped attending any social events within the company because she could no longer follow conversations or join in.
Matilda's increasing deafness may also have deprived her of the chance to take on new responsibilities within her job. In 1995 when she was 52, the work of her department was reorganised to facilitate the introduction of new software. One member of the administration team was to be responsible for work based on the new software while another would deal with the remainder of the work based on the old software. Although Matilda was the most experienced member of the team, the job of supervising the work based on the new software was given to a younger, less experienced colleague and Matilda was left with work based on the old software. She considers that this choice was influenced by her deafness or a combination of her deafness and her age.
As a result of this decision Matilda received no training in the new software on the grounds that she did not need to know what the other members of the team were doing. Where she did have to adjust to changes in the department's computer system, she was expected to teach herself from information booklets when other staff received specific training.
Despite these frustrations no attempt was made to oust her from her job. Once a year she had a formal performance appraisal with her manager. At each appraisal during this period he assured her that her performance was satisfactory, and no one had complained of any shortcomings due to her deafness. However, her manager had virtually no direct contact with her during the rest of the year.
Negotiations with the firm's Occupational Health Department
In addition, Matilda continued to press for the firm to provide her with aids to alleviate the effects of her deafness. During a fire practice she discovered that she had not heard the fire alarm. This was potentially a dangerous situation because she was often in the office on her own. She applied for help to the firm's Occupational Health Department (OHD). It took persistent effort to get the OHD to take action; but eventually she was issued with a vibrating pager, paid for by the firm, which is activated by the firm's fire alarm.
Secondly, as Matilda became more expert and confident in using and understanding BSL, she saw the possibility of taking part in meetings if the spoken word could be translated into BSL. She asked the OHD therefore to arrange for a BSL Interpreter to be hired to attend important business meetings when information about the company's performance and development was presented to staff.
It took several meetings with the OHD for Matilda to convince them that she would benefit from this kind of support and to supply the detailed information required for the firm's application for financial assistance for the hire of BSL interpreters from the Employment Service through the Access to Work scheme. (In the event the firm did not receive any assistance through this scheme but paid the whole cost from its own funds).
The whole process of setting up a system for the hire of BSL interpreters took four months to organise; but when Matilda eventually attended her first meeting supported by BSL interpreters, she found that she could follow the main gist of the presentation and discussion. So she continued to apply (on average twice a year) for BSL interpreters to support her at important business meetings.
The impact of having a cochlear implant
When Matilda's hearing aids no longer improved her hearing her HT suggested that it was time for her to consider applying to have a cochlear implant (CI). Matilda agreed to have her suitability for a CI tested, and, when this was confirmed by the tests, went ahead with the application despite doubts about whether improvements in hearing gained from a CI would really be worth the pain and disruption involved in the operation.
Croydon Local Health Authority authorised her CI and less than a year later, when she was 55, she had the operation. At that point she had been profoundly deaf for about two years.
When the speech processor was turned on, she was puzzled at first by the unfamiliar electronic sounds she heard. As she explained "Voices in general sounded as if they were under water and turned into frogs and croaked their words"; but as her speech processing equipment was fine-tuned and she became conversant with it, she soon found that she could distinguish accurately a huge variety of sounds, including environmental noises, speech and even music. Two years later when I interviewed her, she no longer regarded herself as being profoundly deaf but just slightly hard of hearing.
The most immediate advantage of her CI at work was that she could converse almost normally with colleagues individually, or in groups of two or three. She could take part in office gossip once again and keep in touch with what was going on. Other staff now told her what they were doing and consulted her when they thought that she might have information or advice to offer. She was part of the office network again, and as her CI removed the strain of communication, she found her work much less tiring.
Secondly, her CI enabled Matilda to use the telephone again in carefully controlled circumstances. There was now less need for her to use the telephone because of the much more extensive use of email, not just within the firm but also in contacts with other firms. Nevertheless, she found that she could cope with incoming calls if she knew both the caller and the subject. This information was flashed on to her computer screen automatically when a call was referred to her. If she knew the caller and the subject, she took the call; if not, she asked a colleague to take the call for her.
If she wanted to contact a colleague whom she knew to settle a few points on a familiar subject, she would occasionally use the telephone. She did this by working out in advance what she wanted to ask and then posing closed questions which invited "yes" or "no" answers. However, she did not feel confident enough to telephone anyone whose voice was unfamiliar to her, and for that reason she never used the telephone to contact staff in other companies.
Nor was her CI any help to her in following discussion among a large group of people; so she continued to rely on BSL interpreters at company meetings.
Matilda's new role as Workstation Assessor
Since she has had her CI, Matilda has also shown that she can take on extra responsibilities at work. About a year after she had her CI, she was selected to become the Workstation Assessor for the staff in her department. This new role involved her in three tasks:
- learning about the correct positioning of display screens, keyboards, seating and other office furniture for the health and safety of all the staff in the department;
- assessing the adequacy of the present layout of office furniture to meet health and safety requirements by interviewing all 130 staff in the department; and
- arranging for all the necessary changes to be made.
She had to find time for these tasks without any reduction in her normal workload.
Matilda relished the challenge of this assignment; but she felt sure that without having her CI she could not have coped with either the initial training or the 130 interviews.
Because she was one of only five Workstation Assessors selected throughout the company, she found the training in health and safety requirements fairly easy to absorb. In such a small group she could follow the trainer's presentation, especially as he used an overhead projector and was ready to repeat anything that she did not understand. In addition, after each group training session she reviewed what she had learnt and organised her own follow up session with the trainer to go back over points which were not clear to her.
Once she was sure of the general health and safety requirements, she had half-hour interviews with each of the 130 staff in the department to assess their individual needs. Although she had never met many of these staff before, and some of them had heavy regional accents, she had little difficulty in getting the information required for her assessment and she thoroughly enjoyed her brief contact with a wider range of colleagues.
Matilda's new career
Matilda's recovery of most of her previous powers of communication and the success of her role as Workstation Assessor strengthened her conviction that she was capable of more than her existing finance work and needed a change of job. At her next annual appraisal with her manager she plucked up courage to say that she was underemployed and wanted more demanding work. Her manager noted her request but made no commitment to respond to it.
When shortly afterwards she had to take three months' sick leave for a hysterectomy, she reviewed her employment situation. At the age of 57 she could work for the firm for another eight years until she was 65. There was scope for her to be retrained for a different type of work within the firm; but if that was not going to happen, she did not want to return to the firm after her operation to continue with the same type of work as she had been doing for the past 17 years. She would prefer to do an entirely different type of job, helping people deafened like herself or with other disabilities.
So when the firm was still not prepared to retrain her she decided to leave and negotiated early retirement. However she soon found another part-time job with the local Social Services Department as a care assistant working with disabled children. She finds this job much more satisfying than her previous work because now she can make positive use of her own experience of disability and as a mother. But she is clear that without her cochlear implant she could not have made this move.