Originally Posted by overthepond

Hi AJW, Welcome.

I am from Blighty too. I was born profoundly deaf and BSL was my first language. I am now fluent in English (it's my main language these days), BSL and SSE. I have been brought up in Hearing world, I spent 5 years at boarding Oral deaf school so I pretty much had learnt to cope with hearing world and it can be hard at times. It got worse in the last 10-13 years when I was strugging with lipreading, changes in hearing aids from analouge to digital which didn't benefit me even my hearing loss was stable. I was getting so tired and couldn't cope with full day's work, so I went down the CI route nearly 4 years ago. Since I had it fitted, I am much more chilled out person (that my mum wished i had it done years ago, ) I am much less tired, I can now cope with 2 jobs! (:-)) one is full time at a hearing school and another is evening work at largest/busiest/noisest superstore, no one knows where i got the energy/patience from!! My CI had aided me to lipread much better than before (pre was 40%, post is 90%), I don't think I would be where I am today if it wasn't for the CI.

As for BSL in hearing world, I think learning BSL will help as you'll be surprised how many people had learnt BSL, I had few hearing people signing to me on the tills where i work even though I was speaking to them. With BSL you get best of both. It doesn't have to be BSL you could learn SSE to work with your spoken english. SSE is very similar to BSL but is in the correct order of grammar/stynax along with spoken language. Try make a hobby of it and see how you got on...

Did you say you live in london? If you do I can point out places for you, there is LOADS of deaf people in London (I was born there and have a lot of friends from the deaf school that is now living in London (they are both oral and BSL users).