About Janine

Janine and Barry fell in love in 2001 and shortly after they met, he started to have precipitous loss of hearing in one ear. Learn more about their story from Janine:

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Video Transcripts

I moved up here um... over 20 years ago to marry my husband after a long-distance romance.  

He was 25 years older than me and uh...  we were we were not fixed up by friends, who didn't want me to move away to San Francisco and said he was too old. So that's what you get for not fixing up your friends but introducing them anyway. And actually shortly after we met, he- he started to have a precipitous loss of hearing in one ear. It turned out to be an acoustic neuroma  and so, um, that was treated, uh, but he had no hearing in one ear. Just forever, like, just the left ear. I have to think about being  in the car- like if I was driving, he could hear me.

If he was driving, he couldn't hear me. But hen he started losing more hearing in that other ear, and it was just becoming impossible to have a conversation. He would say that he could read lips, but not really very well and  somehow my pantomimes meant nothing to him. So, um, yeah, it was getting really frustrating. I  mean, I just thought for a while there I would  never have conversations again. It was so hard to try to talk and if I wanted to write a note and I didn't write it neat enough, then he couldn't  read it and it was frustrating and it was, um, it was really not just frustrating, but sad. Like I didn't quite know how we were going to fix that. I tried texting, but he wasn't really good at that kind of technology and then an audiologist one day told us to try Ava and  it was a game-changer, an absolute game-changer.

We set it up and from that very first night. You know, we could talk to each other from across the room and he could hear me real-time and, you know, Ava occasionally gets things wrong, which, you know, could just be funny or confusing. But, um, we used her all the time, all the time. And we'd have friends over and we'd have them download Ava. And then he'd be sitting there with a little script you know and it had different colors for  everybody and- and he knew who was talking when. And it was amazing. We became  that couple in a restaurant who were both staring at our phones. But, uh, the couple that we- the couples we disdained we became because we would take out our phones, and if there was  wi-fi in the restaurant, we would just choose Ava in a restaurant. And it was also great as a one-off, you know even though we weren't going to connect, if I needed to tell him something  really quick, I'd walk up with my phone, turn on  Ava talk into it, and just show it to him and  say you know, "I have to go downstairs and feed the neighbors cats. I'll be gone for 15 minutes."  I mean things that you don't think about saying on the fly and saying quickly, it's really hard  to communicate with someone who can't hear you.