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Collected Item: “Get vaccinated so I can communicate again.”

Give your story a title.

Get vaccinated so I can communicate again.

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

Instagram post

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

Caption to post:

As I’m sure you’ve seen and experienced, mask mandates are starting to come back. In stores, offices, and on my college campus as well.

As a person with hearing loss, masks make it so difficult me for me to communicate. I rely so heavily on lipreading, seeing how the mouth moves when speaking, to understand what is said. Without lipreading, my speech recognition is around 16%. This means with masks, I can only absorb 16% of all interactions - that is incredibly isolating.

When I go back to the classroom in September, it’s going to be so difficult to navigate the classroom setting when I can’t understand anyone. My teachers will have clear masks provided, but what about during group work or when students ask questions that I might also have? I’m going to completely miss out on the college experience I’ve been longing for for a year and a half because people won’t get vaccinated.

I’m tired of disclosing my hearing loss to check out at a store. I’m tired of constantly fighting for closed captioning for online lectures. I’m tired of living in a pandemic where we have a solution to end it.

Vaccines work. Vaccines save lives. Getting the vaccine means you’re helping deaf and hard of hearing people get back to a place where they can communicate again.

SAVE this post and SHARE to spread awareness. This topic is NOT talked about enough and it’s something that affects the deaf and hard of hearing community every single day.

ID IN COMMENTS

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

disability, Instagram, mask mandate, college, hearing loss, communication, ASU, HST580

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

ktnlifts

Give this story a date.

2021-08-10
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