Meet the woman who wants to demystify deafness in Brazil

During childhood, the Paula Pfeifer from Rio Grande do Sul, aged 38, thought he heard well. Over the years, a whistle in the ear began to bother. But the doctors she consulted at the time didn’t pay much attention. Until it got to the point where someone turned on a vacuum cleaner next to her and she didn’t hear a thing. It was only with at age 16 she was finally diagnosed with progressive deafness of unknown cause.

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At first, dealing with this diagnosis was not easy: “I lived in the closet of deafness for years”, he recalls in an interview with CLAUDIA. “I was ashamed to admit myself as deaf. He didn’t speak to people. I was turning around and I know that many times I was seen as rude or rude when, in fact, I wasn’t listening to what was being said to me”. Paula tried to go on with her life without paying attention to the fact – she passed a public contest, started a fashion blog that reached 400,000 unique visits per month. But, over time, she felt the urge to talk about something that connected more with her life experience. In 2007, she started a blog called Chronicles of Deafness to share your experience🇧🇷 In a short time, the site has become a reference and source for deaf people, doctors and speech therapists from all over Brazil.

In 2013, the blog’s content became a book, precisely at another decisive moment in Paula’s life. “I helped others with my blog, but I was in a personal abyss,” she recalls. Was when discovered the possibility of hearing again thanks to a cochlear implant – an electronic device that provides users with a hearing sensation close to physiological. Unlike the “ordinary” hearing aid, the CI has two parts. The internal one is implanted inside the body, in the cochlea (inner ear) of the patient. This has a receiver and stimulator that, through implanted electrodes, stimulates the auditory nerve which, in turn, takes the signals to the brain where they will be decoded and interpreted as sounds. The external part consists of a microphone, a speech microprocessor and a transmitter. Thanks to this device that looks like something “from the future” – Paula even jokes that she is a “cyborg”. Six years after the CI implant, she evaluates how the implant was transformative in her life. “If I had to sum up what the cochlear implant has done for me, it is this: the CI has given me back my life. After 31 years of progressive deafness, isolation, suffering, shame, perrengues, buried dreams, wrong choices because of silence, hearing again was an unexpected gift”, he says in one of his blog texts. Today she happily talks about the emotion it is to hear the sound of the sea or her son, Lucas, almost two years old, shouting “Mamãeeeeee” around the house.

deaf who hear

Paula is also the administrator of a closed group on Facebook that brings together around 15,000 people who exchange experiences and tips on how to deal with deafness. The group, by the way, was chosen in 2018 among thousands of projects around the world to receive funding of BRL 3.7 million from the social network. With that money, Paula created the project “Surdos que Ouvem”, to promote “the demystification of deafness and provide information on auditory rehabilitation” and helping people with hearing problems cope with their condition. This covers a large number of people. According to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), 10 million people declare that they do not hear perfectly. “Deafness is invisible, the deaf are not”, he says.

Although little is said about hearing health in Brazil, the Unified Health System (SUS) offers free and quality treatment for the hearing impaired. Spreading this information is also one of Paula’s flags. “We have one of the best policies in the world in this regard”, he guarantees. The SUS offers, for example, hearing aids for free and the great possibility of reintegrating a hearing-impaired child if he uses the technology since he was a baby. Among the actions of the project, there is a series of videos that show the reality of some “deaf people who hear” in Brazil, among the characters is the director Benedita Casé Zerbiniactress’s daughter Regina Casewho discovered hearing impairment early in childhood and uses the traditional hearing aid.

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