My name is Elizabeth Wilkes. I was born in Yorkshire, UK in 1947, being the eldest of a family of three children. My childhood was spent in East Yorkshire where my father was a rural GP.

In 1969, I completed my training as a State Registered Nurse at University College Hospital in London. After working in various hospitals, I married an architect and had six children.

In 1983, our whole family emigrated to Perth and became Australian citizens in 1985. We lived in various Perth suburbs and in Busselton.

At eighteen years of age I was diagnosed with a mild sensorineural hearing loss, I also had tinnitus for a number of years. My hearing deteriorated until by the age of twenty-five I could no longer hear over a telephone. Over the last thirty-five years until 2004, I wore many different hearing aids, initially in one ear and later in both ears (binaurally). Hearing aids and lip-reading classes gave me the confidence to lipread. In one to one situations I managed well, though I had limited ability in background noise or in groups without a notetaker or a palantypist (speech to text reporter).

In 1999, my children were all financially independent and I felt I needed to retrain for something more suitable than nursing. I had spent five years looking after deaf children at the Mosman Park Deaf School Hostel part-time, learning basic Auslan in order to communicate with the children. After hearing about a course in Hearing Therapy from my lipreading teacher, I went to the U.K and studied for my diploma at the City Lit in London ( the only venue at the time providing a full time course) with considerable financial support and encouragement from UK trusts, family and friends.

During my vacation I visited "The Link Centre for Suddenly Deafened People" in Eastbourne, UK, for their six day residential course. The Centre is the only one of its kind in Europe and provides intensive interactive group and individual sessions to empower suddenly deafened and profoundly deaf people. These people learn to externalise their difficulties and gain expertise in what can be done. Exposure to others in the same situation is also an important element of the course. This six days gave me invaluable insights, both personally and in terms of ideas to bring to my service.

My experience after training was to be thrown in at the deep end into full time Hearing Therapy in a County Hospital in Essex as a locum employed to reduce the waiting list.

In 2001 I was employed by the Hospital Trust at Leeds General Infirmary in Yorkshire to set up a Hearing Therapy service from scratch within the Audiology Department. This was a large teaching hospital serving a population of 750,000 people.

There was initially a four year waiting list for Tinnitus Retraining Therapy. The waiting list for Tinnitus counselling was reduced to four weeks by the time I left after sixteen months. The majority of patients were discharged because their tinnitus had become manageable.

The Hearing Therapy service in Leeds was a service provided by the Audiology Department within the Hearing and Balance Centre as an extension of services already in existence. My work was with patients that needed care over and above that provided by the audiologists. Referrals came from audiologists, ENT consultants, audiological scientists and occasionally GPs and social workers for the hearing impaired.

In April 2004 I had a Cochlear^TM Implant operation. I was only in hospital one night though it was early June before my "switch on" which was very unpleasant. There was so much racket and very little sound was distinguishable. It all blurred together. Because of my work as a Hearing Therapist, I knew that by wearing the processor full time my sound perception would quickly settle down. A few days later I had hysterics listening to my own laughter... I laughed 'til I cried it sounded so funny. By the second week, after many adjustments, I was hearing everything much more clearly and particularly speech. By the fourth week I could hear over the telephone again, after 35 years! The sound of birds was incredible. My home is next to a very busy road and the birds were singing clearly above the noise. The warble of the Australian magpie is just amazing and still gives me a thrill. I am now talking to relatives and friends overseas on the phone for an hour at a time on a regular basis. It is my delight to buy phonecards and surprise people on the 'phone. I am finding my new person. After so many years of severe to profound hearing loss, to have a functional ear, to hear my grandchildren even when they whisper is a great joy and a miracle of modern technology.

With my personal experience of hearing loss and tinnitus together with my Hearing Therapy training and work in the field, I feel I have gained an empathy and understanding of these conditions in their many forms. I appreciate and respect that every problem is individual and cater for those individual needs. I am very much hoping that, in time, this Hearing Therapy service can benefit many people here in Western Australia. Hopefully my website will be an interesting and helpful site for many people experiencing deafness and associated conditions.

Please contact me if you have any queries.