Life Is On

The young man rose, took the two steps across the tiny room and returned with a box of generic Kleenex. I pulled one of the tissues out and dabbed it around my eyes. Since September of 1993 I had spent hours in these cold, stark exam rooms. In August of that year, I was swimming in a friend's pool and went rushing to the bottom to grab hold of the ring my nephew had thrown. As I reached the twelve foot depth I was suddenly gripped with the fear of drowning as an extremely sharp pain shot through my left ear; I fought my usual response to the unexpected, which is to draw in a huge gasp of air (uh, that would have been water). I made it to the surface (and I did gasp) but within a couple of minutes everything was perfectly fine.
"Very strange." I thought to myself; but all's well that ends well.

The next day I was flying to Scotland to meet up with my husband who was going to be there on business and as the plane made its way to cruising altitude, again the knife shot through my ear. It didn't take long to realize that whether it be from depth or height, pressure was the culprit. In Scotland, I saw a general practitioner who gave me a strong antibiotic and a firm order to see a specialist as soon a I got back to the states.

I had known I was dealing with a mild hearing loss for several years and had been to a couple of doctors who told me my eardrums were getting flabby (why not? so was everything else) and therefore the sound was not bouncing off them the way it would if they were still stretched tight; sounds were not resonating. I could live with that... and did. Until that summer, 1993.

Upon the visit to the new ear man, it was clear I would be visiting him for many years to come. I was diagnosed as having advanced cholesteatoma in that ear and surgery was gonna happen. This disorder comes about quite often because of an old infection or injury that was not properly treated or even discovered. I did have a history of ear infections when I was a child and ran some high fevers at times.

After the initial surgery, it has become a regular, every six month occurrence to make a visit to the ear  specialist to remove any new intrusion of scar tissue, or other alien beings that may have hatched there, from the ear canal.  To get to the point of all this, I finally started wearing hearing aids in the late fall of 1998.  Because my hearing loss is a "reverse curve", the loss of low frequency sounds instead if high and the opposite of 98 per cent of the rest of the folks (what's new for me?), it has been a true struggle to get the instruments to actually be a benefit.  I got into the habit of wearing only the left, as that ear has lost 60 per cent of hearing and the right 'only' 40. 

What a struggle... for myself, in trying to hear, missing important info, having people look at me like I'm nuts because I've responded based on misunderstanding, my laughing at all the wrong places in conversations and the very worst, being laughed at.  It's a struggle for others in having to repeat things or raise their voices to decibels high enough to be heard several blocks away (well, not quite that loud).  It's no fun for anyone.

"Life is on.", is the trade slogan of Phonak, the company that makes the new hearing aids I have.  I have been in several times now to get them adjusted to life beyond the cloistered environment of the audiologist's office and into the noisy, traffic laden reality of life in an urban world.  It's been no good.  As soon as I put in the second hearing aid, I imagine what life for dogs exposed to those high-pitched whistles must be like; or life for vampires exposed to sunlight... excruciating!

Until today.  Today a hearing aid technician worked with us in trying to figure out how to compensate for this particular portion of my weirdness, and like a gift from God Himself... I could hear.  The sound is clear.  It is balanced.  It is music.

If one has never had a hearing loss or disability it is difficult to understand the joy of hearing the soft spoken voice of a child or sitting on the front steps (at MY age) and crying over the sounds of birds chattering their news of the day or hearing, after over thirty years of marriage, the gentle whisper, "I love you." from that man you so dearly love.  Yep, after twenty something years of being off-line, once again I'm wired.  Life indeed... is on.