This story is part of the October 6 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories . I didn’t properly investigate the gnawing possibility I might have significant hearing loss until almost 29 years after I was tested as a newborn, those results showing my hearing was neither 100 per cent nor bad enough to really worry about.
Mackenzie Arnold would come to realise that she had spent a lot of her life lip-reading. Credit: John Davis It was about a decade after friends started regularly mentioning they often had to repeat themselves to keep me up to speed in social settings and two-and-a-half years after I realised I had spent a lot of my life lip-reading. It’s not that I was in complete denial; it was more a mix of compartmentalisation and ignorant bliss – until, that is, a global pandemic put every face on earth behind a surgical mask and removed my ability to translate visual signals into the meaning their muffled sounds represent.
Even before COVID-19, Cait [team mate Caitlin Foord] used to cover her mouth sometimes as a joke because she could see me watching her lips move. Instead of taking her point, I’d laugh and tell her to stop being a dickhead then file the issue away again. When I finally sought and received a diagnosis in October 2022, it made sense genetically.
My brother’s hearing loss, while much more severe than mine, was diagnosed at two years and nine months, because his speech was indecipherable. He was fitted with hearing aids and underwent intense spe.