Before Beth Weller discovered the rugby, she hadn’t interacted with other people who had hearing loss.
Hearing Loss Diagnosis
Beth Weller, deaf rugby player, was born 25 weeks premature. Despite this, her hearing loss wasn’t diagnosed for quite some time. Her mother was told that Weller’s issues were due to colds and ill health. She insisted on test after test. Weller wasn’t a sickly child and always struggled in school.
“Often, I wouldn’t know what was going on, have difficulty keeping up with lessons, and would struggle to stay awake,” she says. “I’d get labelled as lazy and naughty because the teachers put it down to a lack of trying, rather than not being able to understand what was going on in the lesson.”
Finally, at the age of eleven, an audiologist at last picked up the problem.
“It wasn’t until a lady called Sue sat me down when I was 11 and said, ‘You have a rare hearing loss called a cookie bite,’” Weller says. “I still have the colored-in audiogram with cartoon sketches to show the range of decibels and different sounds and area that was missing, which was in the mid-frequency range.”
Although her hearing loss was diagnosed as mild, the real issue lay in the gaps of hearing. The gaps were phonetics and the decibel range where speech happens. This gradually began to get worse as the years passed.
“Any background noise like in a school setting I’d struggle to hear what was being said by teachers and my classmates,” says Weller. “So, like many deaf children in mainstream schools, I was quite isolated and had difficulty making friends.”
The problems increased and became worse in high school. During this time Weller found that there was little support and understanding. “The school’s policy on paper was to provide the correct
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