When I was three, my preschool teacher at Trinity Nursery School told my mother something odd was happening in class. I was standing up from my seat, uncharacteristically, and walking around to the front of her piano during music time. She’d discerned that the reason I was doing this was because in order to hear her, I needed to see her so I could read her lips, and she recommended that my mother get my hearing checked.
I suffered from many ear infections throughout childhood, necessitating multiple tubal myringotomy procedures to drain fluids and insert tubes. One of my earliest childhood memories is waking up with blood and pus on my pillowcase, and severe pain. When taken to the ear, nose, throat doctor, my parents were told I had only 20 percent of my hearing remaining from the damage of the infections. The pediatrician told my mother this would probably repair.
Here there’s a weird time jump in the story, because I’m currently 55 and just had my first hearing test since then on Monday of this week. What happened between then and now? Remember, in that first part of the story, I was three. So, I went along, living my kid life, then teenage, and adult life where I got married and raised four children who are also now adults.
In recent years, my hearing has become more of an issue. My kids get tired of me saying “What?” From early ages they learned the reprimand: “Don’t yell at me from another room!” and I’d never thought about how, when one of them or anyone speaks to me, the first thing I do is jump up and run to the room they’re in so I can see them, much like I did with the singing preschool teacher at three. Sometimes I answer a question and the person who was asking it looks at me like I’m nuts because that wasn’t what they asked at all. I’ve always preferred watching a documentary (with closed captions, not in the trendy Zoomer way) to listening to a podcast, because I call myself a “visual learner.”
But in the past year I started getting vertigo and dizziness and my doctor gave me a referral for a hearing test. I sat in the parking lot in tears before going in. Why? Fear. I was afraid of failing the test—maybe that sounds weird but who likes failing anything? Also, shame. I was also afraid the doctor would ask why I hadn’t gotten a hearing test since childhood. I didn’t have an answer. I’d never thought about why my parents never took me back to get my hearing checked. We were a poor family—maybe the specialist appointment was too expensive. There were six kids in the family and several were mentally ill so there were often crises far more serious than my hearing; traveling into the city for something like that would’ve been an extravagance. And since I was three when the main infections were happening, I didn’t remember enough of it to follow up in adulthood. I’d done what Gen X is always expected to do: I adapted to my environment.
The doctor and the audiologist were both very nice women who did nothing to make me feel ashamed, although I was still scared in the tiny padded room. I knew there’d been far too much silence during the hearing test. I settled into the office for the results and stared at the sharp downward curves on the computer screen in red and blue representing my left and right ears as she announced: severe hearing loss. The doctor told me I can’t hear consonants, that my brain had been “filling in the gaps” of the sounds I hadn’t been able to hear all these years. She said that people with this kind of hearing loss often choose careers and environments that are isolated. She asked what I do. I said I’m a writer and candlemaker on an island with a drawbridge: plenty of isolation indeed.
I asked what percentage of my hearing I still have. She said it’s not usually measured that way, but when pressed she said around 20 percent; the same amount I had as a kid. So much for it getting better (although it may have improved for years and then gradually declined with age).
I was told about the high-tech, $7k Bluetooth hearing aids: the only thing I heard was that my husband’s government insurance covered all but $350. You won’t even be able to see them. I asked about volume, because I’m concerned about how loud the world will be when it’s been 80 percent quieter for so long; I’m not sure that’s always been a bad thing. I’ll still be able to turn the world down and only face the music when I feel like it.