Given that both my parents are profoundly deaf, sign language is my first language and I grew up in the deaf community, I choose deafness.
zenzelli78:
To answer your question - yes deaf people can drive. My parents drive both cars and motorbikes. Having been deaf all their lives they’re much more visually aware than most drivers and this more than makes up for being unable to hear.
Sign language may seem like an intricate skill, but really it’s just a language. There’s no great mystery to it - it’s just talking with your hands
Adult-onset deafness is a nightmare scenario for me. There’s no question that if I had to lose one of the two, I’d rather lose my sight. A friend of mine who teaches at a college for the Deaf says that blindness isolates you from things, deafness isolates you from people. My experiences in linguist school lead me to believe she’s not exagerrating. It’s not a matter of whether we’re visually oriented vs. sound oriented… humans are the animals who speak. To be cut off from the language of the majority of the community is a fate I can’t imagine.
Plus, what would I do without music?
(If the question is about whether I would rather have been born deaf or blind, then the answer is I don’t think it would matter. I’d be used to it either way. But at this point, my hearing is more precious to me than my sight.)
If I had to lose either sight or hearing, let me keep my hearing. I’m sound-oriented. I can read via braille or audio books, but don’t take music or voices from me.
And flodnak raises a good point - I’m assuming adult onset as well.
Definitely deaf. If I were deaf, I could still work in my chosen field (mathematics research). However, I can barely even imagine being a mathematician and not being able to look at a blackboard or read a journal. Hyperbolic geometry requires diagrams.
I’ve had this conversation with people as well … and it seems that people that choose “blind” are in the minority.
I’m one of them. I grew up around a blind man (he’s more of a father to me than my own father) and I saw how little he was limited by his “handicap”. He cooked, cleaned, was a college grad, wrote (through transcription), raised his daughter (wife worked full-time+), jogged at least once a day (only his dog went with him).
He read constantly (books on tape), didn’t use braille hardly at all, though he knew it. He is one of the most intelligent and savvy people I know. He taught me my love for music and I could never give that up. I’d definitely rather be blind than deaf.
I am not visually oriented - I get most of my stimulus from sound. Voices and music turn me on far more than an attractive man.
I would cry if I could never hear my Australian’s accent again, or the inflection in his voice when he says “I love you” … that would be torture indeed …
I’d rather be deaf. Tough choice, since I’m visually oriented, but also have very good hearing. I figure that if I were deaf, I could still read lips or sign language.
I’d rather be deaf. I was discussing this very idea with my 2 teenagers just the other day. What started this chain of thought was that I had been couped up with my DH all day, and he just will NOT shut up. As it is, he calls me approximately every 15 minutes (and then wonders why I can’t get anything done.)
A friend of mine came over last night, and the DH so monopolized the conversation, that it was an hour and 1/2 before I actually got to speak with her.
OTOH, maybe it would be better if HE was the one to go deaf.
I’ve thought about this before, as it seems most folks have, and I think I would prefer being deaf. I’d miss music and people’s laughter pretty severely, but I’m mostly a visual and voyeuristic type, so being blind would be pretty crushing to me.
I do think it would be interesting to see how the way I relate to the world would change if I became blind though.
My mother lost her hearing as an adult, and before she got some of it back through an operation, she had a very profound hearing loss.
Since I was able to see how she dealt with it, and since Mrs. Kunilou received her training in deaf education, I would feel much less intimidated losing my hearing than my sight.
