HSC Profiles
Kristin Johnston
Sound Experience:
Hearing is believing
Tucked behind a curtain of dark hair, two tiny tubes sloping from Kristin Johnston’s ears connect her to the world. Diagnosed with severe hearing impairment and fitted with hearing aids at age 3, Johnston has flourished despite her disability.
After graduating with a UF doctor of audiology degree, she has spent the past year examining children with chronic ear infections alongside an ear, nose and throat specialist. She also tests children for auditory processing disorders at the UF Speech and Hearing Center, a service of the College of Public Health and Health Professions’ department of communicative disorders.
Johnston’s patients benefit from her personal experience with hearing loss. While it takes many audiologists years to develop a “bag of tricks” to suggest to patients with hearing impairment, Johnston has one built-in. She can give tips on cell phone use to teenagers or reassure parents craving solutions for their children.
“There are times when a patient feels like it is the end of the world,” she said. “I encourage people to see that it hasn’t stopped me, it hasn’t slowed me down. There are things that I have to do to get around it, I admit. But I can show people they can do it.”
Under the mentorship of James Hall III, Ph.D., UF’s chief of audiology, Johnston is currently earning a Ph.D. in audiology. A lifelong piano player and avid music-listener, Johnston wants to make music listening easier and richer for people with hearing impairment.
Although many hearing aids have music settings, she said, the quality of sound varies by type of music and kind of hearing disability.
“A person who plays a string instrument is going to have different needs than someone who just wants to listen to the radio or someone who wants to go to a concert and hear a full-blown orchestra,” she said. “I want to be able to hear music and enjoy it, and I realize that hearing aids are not always set optimally for that kind of listening.”
Johnston knows, for example, that her hearing aid will likely squash a swelling sound in a blues tune and whistle or reverberate when she plays various notes on the piano.
Born before infant hearing tests became routine, Johnston said she has most likely had hearing impairment from the beginning of her life, when she was born not breathing, without a heartbeat.
In all of her childhood, she remembers only one time that her brothers referred to her hearing loss. The family had recently moved to a new neighborhood and one of her brothers introduced her to the neighborhood kids, saying, “This is our little sister Kristin and she can’t hear very well, so don’t let her run out in the street.”
“They just made me feel safe,” Johnston said. “I felt I could do anything anyone else could do — and I could. I wanted not only to do my best, but to do the best.”
