Eleni Koutsomitopoulou
Hi, there!
I'm a Greek female 32 yrs old. I have family all over the globe, but I'm currently far from everyone. I came to the U.S.A in the summer of 1997 to start my doctoral studies at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. Needless to say, I loved it here. I'm now done with all but my dissertation, which keeps me quite busy, when I am not at work. I'm a computational linguist (check my web page for more on my specialization). In Oct 2000 I moved to Ohio accepting a job offer with LexisNexis in Dayton. I live there ever since.
When I was 19 I visited a hospital thinking that there must be something wrong with my ears. Had no idea what to expect. The diagnosis came as a quite brutal shock. I had sensorineural hearing loss at that time moderate, but hopelessly progressive. After several visits to doctors' and audiologists' offices, I got my first ITE hearing aids. My first HA made me sick emotionally and bodily: my whole system was rejecting them.
They would amplify every little meaningless sound, but human speech was still unintelligible. College years turned into a continuous struggle to accept myself. I had plans for myself that my hearing loss impeded greatly. Graduated with a BA in 1992. Worked as a teacher in the private sector until and during my MA in linguistics (for which I moved to Crete, in Southern Greece, and later in Amsterdam, Holland), and eventually made the leap to leave my country in order to pursue my interests in computational linguistics. I love to watch linguistic theories materialize in computational applications. Language and communication are extremely valuable to me. My current severe to profound hearing loss cannot get worse (is there "more deaf" than deaf?), but I'm always discovering new ways to help myself. My dream? To offer people the love, care and emotional support they need to flourish.
I currently use BTE HAs, the latest digital Widex Senso model. They're good, I used to have better signal strength with my programmable SIEMENS (and they were cuter, smaller), but what the heck, at this point doesn't make any big difference. Lipreading and speechreading are essential. I use VCO at work, and I recently got my first cell phone (Nokia 5135) that I use with the special neckloop for extra amplification and background sound reduction. I have to admit that I'm still a phono-phobic but I'm slowly improving in this area as well. :-) My coping motto is: do exactly what you are mostly afraid to do. This has taken me to some pretty adventurous places so far :-).
Cheers!