Ruby's cochlear implants are like built-in AirPods

This interview was a very successful one and was my favourite out of the four I have conducted so far.

Ruby is a sixteen year old girl who lives in Worthing and attends a sixth form college after achieving high GCSE grades. She fell ill with meningitis when she was only a year old which she recovered from but unfortunately the illness made her profoundly deaf. She had a cochlear implant surgically implanted and went to a state primary and secondary school and grew up with hearing students.

When you meet Ruby you would never have guessed that she was deaf. The way she spoke was just like you and I would speak. There were no issues with the pronunciation of her words and no issues with her trying to understand what I was saying. I found this amazing how someone who is completely deaf seems just like a hearing person. During the interview Ruby said that people not knowing she if deaf can sometimes put her at a disadvantage. She works in a busy, loud cafe and customers can be quite rude to her if she doesn't quite catch what they're saying because they do not realise that she is deaf. Ruby has a cochlear implant so she cannot differentiate the different sounds in a busy environment so she sometimes struggles to hear what a customer in her cafe is asking her. She expressed how this sometimes becomes frustrating because the customer does not understand that she has a hearing impediment.

Ruby's cochlear implants are like built-in AirPods!

She expressed how supportive the schools she attended were, as well as her fellow hearing students. For example, I asked Ruby what was the question she gets asked the most about her hearing impediment and she said that her school friends get fascinated by her cochlear implants as she can play music and make phone calls through the bluetooth system inside her implants so she essentially has built-in 'AirPods'!

Ruby was an interesting interviewee as she had achieved very good GCSE grades considering her disability. This goes against the national statistics I am using in my project saying that deaf students are two grades below hearing students. This was a subject that I brought up in the interview asking Ruby how she got such good grades. She said that she put a lot of work into her studies and the support from both her parents and the school was very good. Ruby felt that she wasn't at a disadvantage by being in a state school with a hearing impediment because she feels that it is better to be with hearing students to help her form the communication skills she needs to go to university and in to the world of work. Also, she felt that she got plenty of support from the school to help her achieve the best grades that she could.