First, the evening peregrine report I gave to my fellow falconistas:
Clara showed up a few minutes before eight and paced the inside of the nestbox back and forth, finally stopping, head bowed with Little Boy Blue's remains just in front of her. Her beak opened wide a moment, her head went down, and she appeared to be trying to push it all down, down into the gravel with the top of her head bowed way over. She came back up with her empty beak closed. Then she hopped out of the box. Flew to her sentry spot. She preened just a moment, and then was away and out of sight. Kekoa and Maya continue to hang out on the louver, Kekoa's face to the building, Maya's in her back--wait, now she's looking around again. But she's clearly no longer afraid of heights nor of standing on the edge looking down. Cool.
Meantime, there was a two-hour hearing health to-do at our clinic today and I was curious to know what the latest and greatest hearing aids might be. I decided to go.
I made it through the first 35 minutes of, this is what hearing loss is, this is what hearing aids are, and this–I guffawed out loud without meaning to, having gotten my first pair at 27–is why they won’t make you look old. The statistic appeared on their PowerPoint: 65% of the people who wear them are under 65!
Granted, I’m not new at this. But I was disappointed that when the speaker talked about speech sounding like mumbling without hearing aids, she didn’t say outright that the reason is because consonants are higher pitched than the vowels because they’re made with your tongue against your teeth instead of vibrating in your throat. I remember what a revelation and how extremely helpful that one piece of information was to me at 18 when I was told I was going slowly deaf (it was an aspirin allergy, we eventually found out). It all made sense now why I could hear someone and not process what they were saying.
Can you imagine some person there who IS old–the conference room was packed with old–who thinks they’re going senile when that’s all that’s the matter? I wanted to exclaim, Be merciful, woman, don’t dumb it down!
I escaped. When one of the audiologists stepped out the crowded conference-room door in front of me, I followed her. She’d gone to the end of the hall to direct incoming human traffic if need be. Well, so I was the traffic, then: I had questions to ask, definitely, and no patience to sit through another 85 minutes of that, not even with my makes-me-look-old knitting.
The best thing to do, she told me, was go talk to the vendors set up outside in the courtyard.
Greaaaaaat… We peeked through the blinds together and she pointed out a particular table in the shade near the door–I later went to the guy and said, I can’t be out in the sun at all. You’ve got two minutes. He used his three minutes well. And I went home with the usual two temporary very small spots of white-out in my vision that are my first sign of sun overdose. Worth it. They have a music setting now… I need to learn more, but I’ve got the brochure and I’ve started.
Meantime, upstairs, as she and I talked, I got the impression she was enjoying being able to be really helpful and informative for someone who was motivated and who knew what she was talking about. For me, I was thrilled at being able to talk about the health stuff that is part of the context without having a new person get all sorry about it–it just is, is all, move on.
She told me what I needed to know about cochlear implants should I have to have that next surgery (I’ve spent the last four or five days getting over yet another blockage) and should I again lose hearing from the pain meds–tylenol. I can do tylenol. Which is not so good in the scalpel department. I described the dilaudid going into the IV and the voices of the medical personnel around me going out.
I am a musician. A fairly deaf musician, but a musician. She told me the implants wouldn’t give me music quite well enough–but they would give me back speech. She talked about having to retrain the brain to hear again amidst noise, and I was like, yeah yeah been there done that a couple of times now I know all about that. But then, she said: for speech, my hearing would be normal with this.
She said it again for emphasis. Normal.
I very nearly burst into tears on the spot. Which totally surprised me.
But would I give up music, really hearing music at perfect pitch, for life? No.
Which is fine because they wouldn’t give me the implants at Stanford without putting me through a bajillion tests to make absolutely sure I can’t manage on the hearing aids. And I can.
At least until that next surgery.
But now I have a backup plan for something that had had me in such great fear. After having been told over and over in years past (before the surgeries and the reaction) that cochlear implants would do me no good.
They would do me unfathomable good should I come to need them. Again, I have a backup plan, now that I need one. And I cannot begin to tell you what a relief that is.