On Being Deaf
Take care of your hearing, because when it goes. it’s gone and even the best hearing aides can’t bring it back where it was. Back to not having to say ‘what’ or ‘could you please repeat’ or ‘please speak more slowly.’ Back to being able to fully participate in conversations. Back to enjoying music of any genre because it now all sounds so distorted from what you remember that it used to sound like. Audiologists, when fitting you, will caution, “Don’t expect the hearing aids to correct you hearing fully back to where it used to be.” Sadly true.
The first step is to admit to yourself that you are DEAF, not “just a little hard of hearing.”
It started insidiously for me—my adult children saying ‘you should go to have your hearing checked because we have to repeat ourselves now talking to you.’ ‘Maybe you should speak more clearly and not with you mouth full as Mom and I tried to teach you,’ I’d retort. This was in my late sixties after I’d retired. When I finally conceded that there could be a problem and saw an audiologist, I was told that I had mild to moderate hearing loss, slightly more in the right than the left ear and that a hearing aide could be helpful.
I ordered a pair of hearing aids and, after having them fitted and adjusted, I suggested to my wife, “Let’s go to the noisiest restaurant we know for dinner tonight and see if I can understand you.” That was Ryan’s, a favorite. To put the new contraptions through their paces, I asked to be seated by the open kitchen and, through the clatter of pans and dishes, the cacophony of conversations, I could hear and understand my wife. A revelation!
That happy state of instrument-enhanced hearing continued for many years. But then at the symphony I found that the percussion section seemed too prominent and intrusive. So I asked to change my seating to one on the left side of the hall by the string section. That didn’t quite solve the problem, but the music sounded better, more balanced, to me. And I could still enjoy my CDs and FM radio. Understanding speech continued to not be a problem.
It was probably a coincidence, but around the time that the COVID pandemic struck, I began to have problems understanding speech. People sounded like they were speaking loudly enough but their words were harder and harder to comprehend. Not being a lip reader, I tried to fake it, piecing together the parts of a conversation that I could understand and guess at the whole of what was said. That worked sometimes and at other times led to “That’s not what I was asking (or saying).”
Time to retest. In previous tests I had always scored well in the speech comprehension part of the test where you are fed a word through your headset and asked to repeat it. But now my comprehension was down in the sixty percent range. And yes, there was a new generation of hearing aids out. So I bought the highest rated one. The audiologist asked me what my primary concern was and I answered understanding speech, so that was the bias that she adjusted the hearing aids for.
But now music became very distorted from what I remembered that it sounded like, even using the “music”setting on the hearing aides. (I should mention that the higher rated hearing aids do have a variety of settings—general use, speech emphasized, noisy environments, music, and customizable.) I would have settled for instrumental/symphonic music sounding as if I was listening to it on AM radio. But now what I heard was not even at that level of fidelity. And singers voices were so painfully distorted that I just could not listen to my favorites anymore, preferring to ‘hear’ them in memory. I’ve gone back to have further adjustments on now my third pair of hearing aids but, as I was told, there is just so much that can be corrected when the nerves are dying. And so I’ve lost the joy of actually listening to music.
There was another quirk that I discovered related to use of the various hearing aid settings. I am no longer sure of what my voice really sounds like since it seems different internally to me with each adjustment. When I ask others, they say my voice sounds the same.
Unfortunately over time, it became progressively harder and harder to understand words. The audiologist made a number of suggestions to help speech comprehension. The person speaking should always face you and not have their back to you when speaking; They should not mumble or speak with food in their mouth; They should not have their hand over or close to their mouth; They should speak distinctly and slowly. And for you, the deaf one, try to avoid extremely noisy situations. Well and good, but should I hand this list to everyone that I’m planning to have a conversation with?
I’m aware of how frustrating it is for the hearing to deal with the deaf. How much easier it is to just bypass and ignore the deaf person and to talk around him or her as if they’re a part of the furniture. And there is the problem that because you are ‘dumb’—meaning non-verbal—at gatherings because you are unable to follow the multiple conversations swirling around you, there will be those who will think you are ‘dumb’—meaning stupid— because you don’t speak up. Well there is that saying, “Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” But sadly with advancing age, the mind also does process what it hears more slowly because it must do an internal verification that it heard correctly. and so yes, there can be a lag between what is said to you and your reply. So in conversations, you may truly appear dumb, because you are slower to respond.
Isolation compounds the problem. It is hard work to concentrate on what others are saying, even on TV. But the less one practices listening, the easier it is to retire into one’s own internal world. A world where what one’s own thoughts are easily understood. And that retreat then becomes a descending spiral. So fight the gathering deafness, work to listen carefully to what is being said. Don’t let yourself become dumb and dumber.
And be thankful when people are willing to repeat themselves because you didn’t get what they had said the first time. Be very thankful when people try to include you in the conversation by speaking more slowly, more loudly, speaking directly facing you, repeating themselves, and hiding their frustration at having to do so. By trying to talk to you and include you, they are showing that they realize you are an old person (forget euphemisms like ‘senior citizen’— you are old!) with a hearing deficit but a working mind and that you are not just dumb—ie stupid—or senile.
