I'm not sure if you'll respond to this, but I will try to be as precise as possible to help you understand what others are trying to communicate to you. (Of note - everywhere where I would have said "talking about" or "saying" or whatnot, I've replaced with "communicating/communicated/etc" to avoid confusion over whether or not I actually mean verbal communication over the internet, since we're really all typing messages to each other.)
1) The forum, as a whole, is for all people who are any form of deaf, or interested in any form of deafness. This includes the following mutually exclusive categories of people:
- Physically deaf (or hard of hearing); Culturally Deaf
- Physically deaf (or hard of hearing); not culturally Deaf <-- This is the category that you, drphil, appear to fall under
- Physically hearing; Culturally Deaf
- Physically hearing; not culturally Deaf
The majority of the population of the world falls into category four. The default position for someone who is either late-deafened or simply ignorant of the existence of Deaf Culture (such as yourself) tends to be category two.
Membership in categories one or three generally requires a desire to identify with that group. When people communicate about being either "deaf" or "Deaf", the "capital D" indicates that they're communicating about "Culturally Deaf" (and more specifically, not communicating about you personally, since you do not identify with this cultural group). The "lowercase D" indicates that they're communicating about "phsycial deafness" which
does include you.
And before you ask why the people at Sunnybrook didn't inform you of any of this, it's because the process of getting a CI doesn't generally involve the Culturally Deaf community. I know for a fact that you've been given the address of your local Culturally Deaf community center, so if you would prefer to have someone explain this information to you in person, you can feel free to visit there, and they will explain the same things which I just have as well.
If you have any further questions, feel free to actually ask them. It seems clear that you have a significant misunderstanding with the meaning of many things that several people have been trying to communicate to you. Your responses have demonstrated this misunderstanding and often appear to be insulting the person you're responding to due to this misunderstanding.
If you're not
trying to be insulting, then feel free to actually ask people about anything that appears to be a miscommunication, and I'm sure most people here will be more than willing to clarify their meaning for you.