During the last several days of my recovery, it was clearly evident that I could not hear. People and doctors were talking to me, but I wasn’t able to answer them when they expected me to do so. I remember the day the Otolaryngologist (Ear, Nose and Throat doctor - ENT) came in to talk with me and ask me questions about my hearing. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t follow.
I kept looking at Mama for clues. Finally, Mama said, “She can’t hear what you’re telling her.” I read her lips, as she asked him, “Is this hearing loss permanent or temporary?” The doctor said he didn’t know and that he would have to do some tests. He arranged to have my hearing checked.
That next morning, I was wheeled out of the hospital through a connecting corridor to the ENT’s office. I felt the hot, dry Fresno summer heat whip through my nostrils for the first time in weeks.
In the ENT’s office, I was wheeled into a room and helped to sit in a special soundproof testing booth. I noticed the booth was lined with the same material that covered the walls and ceilings of the choir and band rooms at my high school. Cushy earphones were placed on my head next. Then the ENT began transmitting sounds through the earphones, testing each ear separately.
I was asked to raise my right hand when I heard a sound in my right ear, and my left hand when I heard sound in the left ear. It was pretty confusing because I wasn’t sure the beeps I was hearing were tones from the machine, or from the crickets and bees playing music in my ears. For days the ringing in my ears, or “tinnitus,” that I was experiencing was often loud enough to wake me from my sleep.
I heard sounds of crickets chirping, bees buzzing, computers clicking, bells ringing, dishes clanking, banging pipes, and a plethora of high pitched, flute-like notes.
As tones were beeped to my ears through the headphones, those extraneous head-noises continued to play tricks on my mind. I began to feel self-conscious about raising my hand, not knowing for certain what I was hearing or not hearing. There were long periods of time when I wasn’t raising my hand at all because I was clearly not hearing any tones, yet I noticed the tester moving his hand along the machine all the time.
Then the ENT removed and replaced the earphones with a vibrating instrument that rested against the bones behind my ears to test the bone conduction. I could feel the vibrations really strong, and I thought I could hear some of the lower tones along with it. Next, the ENT replaced the cushy earphones on my ears and spoke to me in a microphone through a window. His voice was the loudest I had heard in weeks, and I jumped, startled!
“Ow! Too loud!” I said. The ENT apologized and told me I was probably experiencing “recruitment,” which he wrote down on a piece of paper. I didn’t understand what he was talking about then, but I remembered the word.
I eventually learned that “recruitment” causes the perception of sound to become too loud, too fast! The sounds reaching the brain of people with recruitment appear to be much louder than normal. Even today, whenever I go in to get my hearing checked, my recruitment always gives me trouble right off the bat. The audiologists take a look at my audiogram and start testing me at the loudest sound levels where I can hear. But, with recruitment, those sounds are already too loud for me to stand! My eyes cross, my teeth clench and my body cringes at the volume.
The last part of the hearing test was painless, but the most frustrating. It was a word discrimination test. Unfortunately, I was unable to distinguish one sound from the next without looking at the tester’s lips. The words, especially monosyllabic words, all sounded about the same to me. There was no difference between “run,” “sun,” or “done.” Even while lip-reading, I could not distinguish the difference between “mat,” “pat,” and “bat.” They all look the same on the lips. With or without volume, I couldn’t tell them apart. “Baseball” was a little easier to hear, but “oatmeal” and “horseshoe” threw me for a loop.
Even at increased volumes, I had “fuzzy” hearing. Speech was unintelligible. It was just meaningless, rhythmical grunts and noise. The only way I made sense of things was to try to lip-read and make guesses based on context. Fortunately, having been in choir for 7 years, I had become a pretty good lip-reader. Unfortunately, only about 30% of the sounds in the English language are made on the lips or teeth. Many sounds like “k”, “g”, or “ing” are made in the back of the throat.
Before I was wheeled back to my recovery room in the hospital, I was given a copy of my audiogram, but couldn’t understand what it measured or meant. The ENT tried to explain it to me using some gestures for big and small while pointing to the “O’s” for one ear and the “X’s” for the other. Apparently one ear was a little better than the other, but both were in the severe decibel loss categories.
The big questions were whether or not it was a temporary or permanent loss, and whether or not it would improve, stay the same, or get worse. We would have to wait and see.
