Photo credit: Jack Sparrow
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
I don’t necessarily believe the old adage that “[t]here’s a silver lining to every cloud,” but this story from the World Hearing Day site shows that, at least for some, there was indeed a silver lining to the COVID pandemic cloud. Audiologist Katrin Manella was born with a congenital profound bilateral hearing loss. She learned to lip read at an early age. As she writes:
My eyes were my ears–enabling me to actively participate in a daily life very similar to that of people with normal hearing. And in noisy situations, my perceptions sometimes even better.
During the pandemic, work shifted to video calls. Everyone looked at the camera, and she was able to lipread much more easily than if someone was sitting alongside her at a meeting.
Definitely an unexpected silver lining for her, and probably for many other hearing impaired people, during the worldwide COVID pandemic.
