I got sent to a new doctor today, someone who was evaluating whether I should be in a sleep study; the referring doctor wanted to cover all the bases.

Masks are still required here.

I warned the nurse about my hearing and the lipreading being blocked and even mentioned that I’d given some thought to cochlear implants; when I started to tell the doctor, his eyes smiled and he told me, Yes, I’ve heard.

His voice was helpfully low-pitched but he had to repeat himself a few times, and after a few minutes he finally asked me with both compassion and a giving-it-to-me-straight the line he’d clearly said many times before: “Have you considered getting hearing aids?”

It was all I could do not to fall on the floor laughing. Dude, you are 36 years late to that party. I have a veritable museum of the technological advances over the years, including the 1986 pair whose squealing feedback every time my hair crossed my ears actually cost me 15 dB permanently. Thankfully they don’t make them like that anymore. But what I said was, “I have them–or there would be *nothing*. We’re talking 100, 110 dB.”

Bless him, he knew what that meant. So many people don’t. He did a small “wow!” and okay, then. I didn’t say, well I’m still at 85 and 90 in the lower frequencies, having made my point that I am emphatically not one of those old people being vain and avoiding the things and deliberately making myself miss out on human interaction.

“What happened?”

I told him I’d overdosed on baby aspirin as a toddler when Mommy wasn’t looking and set up an allergic reaction to it and it was years before anybody connected the growing loss not to fevers but to NSAIDs.

Ah…

And I went out of there randomly chuckling all the way home. Have I thought about… Right. Yes, yes I think I have.

But at least I was able to reassure him that loud noises don’t keep me up at night.