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| Artist: Albert Robida, 1894 Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Internet Archive / University of Toronto Libraries |
For most of us, hearing loss slips into our corporeal homes like a stereotypical cat burglar as we sleep. As we age. Tick, tick, tick, tick.
We're not aware of any loss at first, and then we notice changes, especially in group environments, say, that are easy to dismiss as temporary or because of this or that special environmental condition. A cold, maybe. The music is too loud, maybe, submerging the conversation. You remember your parents complaining at times, at a certain age, that people were mumbling or not speaking loudly enough or there were too many conversations clacking at once.
Maybe it doesn't make any sense if some of you, like me, can hear the quiet ticking of a clock, a whoosh of a door opening, and can even hear just fine the volume of what people are saying around you, but you can't discern the words. Or you can distinctly hear a sound, but where the hell is it coming from? Or some sounds actually hurt your ears, not because of the volume necessarily, but because of, I don't know, the register it is in.
Over time, you find yourself asking "What?" too often. Maybe you start withdrawing from a table conversation because it's too much effort to hear and you're tired of (and angry about and self-conscious about) "what?" coming out of your mouth too often.
At some point, perhaps prodded by a family member or friend or colleague, or sheer surrender to your exasperation, you get a hearing test.
And there it is. Irrefutable evidence splayed on a graph with lines, x's, and circles: hearing loss.
At this point, I'm going to stop, because there are so many variations on individual losses in hearing. In articles to come about my own experience, I will talk about what might happen next. Because crossing the frontier from the hearing of our youth to whatever our current reality seems to be is very much like moving to a country where we don't know the language, we don't know the customs, we don't know the rules, and we don't even know what questions we should ask and who are the people to ask, because not all ENTs, audiologists, and hearing instrument specialists bring the same skills, testing instruments and equipment, and device brands to the table.
Spoiler alert: The vast majority of us want to hear conversations in a group setting, in a restaurant, at a picnic gathering. That is The One Thing we most want, most of us. And that is The One Thing that hearing aids continue to under-deliver, irrespective of their technology, their ballyhooed AI features, or their price. That One Thing is the plump fruit just out of reach.
But for now, I just want to give due respect to the cosmetic aspect of all this: our vanity.
We have to deal with that before we can wade into the swampy frontier land that is hearing assistance.
And, yeah, if hearing aids are in your future, there are devices that are smaller and more discreet than what our parents had, but the discreetness can cost the wearer in effectiveness and ease of use. Just another gator to throw into the swamp.