but they can be very loud. My niece went through a stage that was so bad that we had to stop visiting. I'm surprised she didn't scar her vocal cords.
The only sounds I hear without my HA aren't real.
(you never really realize how much you speak in terms of senses until you are dealing with not having a sense or talking with people who are without that sense- I dated a guy that was blind once and it is comical to think of how often we say "see" when what we really mean is "realize" or "recognize", as in "see what I mean?". Any time I would say something like that he would reply "no, I don't, I can't see" or something equally silly.). I apologize if that comment ruffled some feathers or caused confusion- thanks for pointing out my mess-up 
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Sorry Bottesini... I think I miss-said what I meant (or misinterpreted what was said previously)... NO, they didn't say that it was hard to deal with the sound but that is the only way my brain could think at the moment to put what I was thinking... I really meant that it appears to be difficult at times to keep up with/deal with things when you have to rely on lip-reading and other visual cues without the aid of sign or hearing aids... And I know at some levels of deafness there are still some sounds that come through, so I would think that if you did not have the aid of hearing aids and you were trying to concentrate on what little sound you could possibly hear then it would be hard to deal with at times... I hope that makes more sense and clarifies what I meant. I am still quite new to all this and I guess at times I "speak" with a "hearing brain"
Hope that clears up any confusion on that end of things .
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). I catch on to concepts and ideas pretty quickly and it is really not that hard to understand the underlying concept of "audism" (as it is not very hard to understand the underlying concept of any -ism). Also, I work in a field that is very sensitive to oppression and -isms so I might be a little more fine-tuned to pick up on and be sensitive to things that fall in those categories because of the work I do (I have worked over five years at a Domestic Violence center and it does have a way of changing the way you look at some things- especially oppression and -isms). But I do agree with you that -isms have a tendency to push people away and divide people rather than unite them so I try my best to view all sides of a situation as clearly as possible. I also think that a lot of people who express views that appear "audist" (or other -ists/-isms) don't really realize what they are doing- such was probably the case with the doctors I spoke of. Hope that makes sense...
I consider myself "new to this" because I have not really been exposed to any deaf (or many hard of hearing) people in my life and I definitely have never been the parent of a deaf or hard of hearing person before
As for the "opinions" I have developed about "audism"- I do a lot of reading. When I find myself in a situation that is unfamiliar (as I did when we suspected that our daughter was possibly deaf), I begin looking everywhere I can to find information that might help me to better understand the situation (I guess I'm a thinker- I think I think too much sometimes
