Remember when I came to out of surgery in August and the first thing I saw was a group of doctors surrounding the foot of my bed talking to me? Trying to get me to answer their questions? Their mouths were moving but there was no sound. Nada. I groggily asked for my hearing aids, put them in, fumbled the battery cases closed and turned the things on…
And heard nearly nothing still.
Nobody had any idea why. This was not supposed to happen.
Things got somewhat better; then, on my last day in the hospital, I was given a dose of Dilaudid when taking my surgical tube out proved extremely painful–and as that dose went into my IV, it was like turning the volume down on the voices around me with an ever-so-slight time delay. The Dilaudid. Busted.
I put off getting my hearing tested. I wanted to give my ears recovery time. But mostly, I wanted not to believe I’d permanently lost more of my hearing, and if I waited, and it was so, then there could be no arguing with it.
There is now no more arguing with it: I finally got in to see John Miles today.  It’s a 5dB loss across the board, all frequencies, both ears, except for one holdout at 1KhZ in one ear that stayed the same. Mind you, I had already become someone who didn’t hear train whistles or fire alarms most of the time without those aids in.
I drove home exulting at being able to again hear music playing clearly, cranked up high to try to drive out of my brain the horribly kitschy Helen Reddy greatest hits album I had the great misfortune to listen to last week because a friend was throwing it away and I thought I’d give nostalgia a kick, deaf or no. (I know. I liked it when I was 12, too. Some of the songs were okay, but some–I won’t even tell you the names of those earworms. I’m nicer than that.)
I have smart friends…. I woke up at 5 am with the worst of the earworms singing away gleefully at perfect pitch. Nooooo…! I listened to everything today from Camel to Christmas carols. Cleanse, brain, cleanse!
I still say this hearing thing is worth it.
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*Consonants, which are made with the tongue against the teeth, are higher-pitched than vowels, which are made reverberating in the throat, and so the consonants are the first to disappear in a high-frequency loss, which is what most older people have. This is why people sound to them like they’re mumbling. They’re missing pieces of the words. That previous sentence would then be “e i i e i o e o.”
Me, I’ve been older since my teens.