Hi everyone,

I have had varying degrees of visual and auditory impairment, both on the physical and processing levels. I always had a visual processing disorder, which was only diagnosed after 12 years of being physically legally blind, unbeknownst to all the adults in my life. I still have a visual processing disorder but it was lessened by 2.5 years of intensive vision therapy.

I experienced physical vision loss in 2008 and physical hearing loss in 2009 and was almost totally deaf and totally blind by 2010, up until recently, when intense acupuncture helped me restore both my hearing and vision. My physical sight and hearing are close to where they were before. The acupuncture also resolved my chronic pain and joint issues.

That said, I still have trouble processing both vision and hearing. I can only use my ears or eyes, but not both at the same time. It also requires a tremendous amount of brain calculation to make sense of speech and visual sign. I have to see the person's lips to understand speech and I have to have visual sign repeated to me 2 or 3 times before I get it. I'm hoping to improve my auditory processing comprehension to a point that I can become an interpreter for the deaf and deaf-blind.

The exact nature of my vision and hearing loss was at least partially neurophysiological (from head trauma) and possibly also psychogenic. Even if it was partially psychogenic, though, the actual vision and hearing loss were very real. I couldn't see or hear any more than someone whose retinas or eardrums are gone, so I had to learn the same methods as someone whose deaf-blindness is entirely physiological.

As a result, I learned cane skills, sign language, screen reader technology, and braille. I find all of these methods easier to work with. Now I use my eyes and ears until they get tired, and then I have the option to either take a break by meditating or switch back to braille/sign. My ears and eyes are good for about 2 hours at a time, using one at a time or alternating between the two channels. The only time I can use them together, though, is to understand speech, where I have to be able to hear the person clearly and read their lips. Otherwise if I am focused on something auditory, I completely miss anything visual, and vice versa.

I've been diagnosed with Asperger's and have a history of severe PTSD as well, which seems to be a trend I've noticed with a lot of SPD sufferers.

No matter what happens to me physiologically or on the processing level, I will always feel a connection to the world of deaf-blindness (whether functional, physiological, or both) and to the world of tactile signing. I also totally advocate the use of tactile sign for people on the autism spectrum and people with sensory processing disorders.

tactilesigner