In 1981, at the young age of 17, I recovered from a rare illness that took my hearing. The second month following my release from the hospital was marked by that all-powerful first trip to an audiologist to be fitted for hearing aids. This was as dreadful as it was exciting. It was a strange concept to be fitted for hearing aids at such a young age, as I had always associated hearing aids with senior citizens and being old. I had never seen anyone my age using hearing aids before. I also wasn’t fond of wearing them. I thought they were ugly and drew unwanted attention to my new disability. I was not yet comfortable in my new identity as a hearing impaired person and I didn’t want other people to see me as “broken.” I was glad that my hairstyle was long and covered my ears so my hearing aids would not be seen.
Getting hearing aids also meant having to accept that my hearing loss was probably permanent, which I still didn’t want to believe. Yet, I eagerly went through with the procedure only because, like many people who finally get fitted for hearing aids, I naively believed they would restore my hearing.
Sadly, this was not the case. While my hearing aids did help increase volume at times, they did not help with speech distortion. For me, using hearing aids was like listening to people talk through tin cans under water. Words were mostly fuzzy, unintelligible, or horribly garbled. Ironically, while most sounds were too soft to hear, sometimes they were too loud to stand!
This fuzzy and unusually loud hearing was a result of a condition called “recruitment,” which accompanied my bilateral sensori-neural hearing loss.
With my new “ear horns,” as my step-dad used to call them, I could hear forks scraping loudly across porcelain plates, the clip-clop of shoes pounding the ground, and the wind whipping my hair across my hearing aids (which sounded as if I were standing near a loud vacuum cleaner!). With all these abnormally loud environmental sounds, I could not hear conversation clearly. In fact, my hearing aids only served to hinder my ability to make any sense out of speech. This could be one reason why some people refuse to wear their hearing aids after being fitted for them. Silence can be golden and a lot less stressful.
During my word discrimination tests with the audiologist, with or without additional volume, I was not able to distinguish similar sounding words. They all sounded about the same to me. Was it “done,” or “dumb,” or “thumb,” or “fun”? Words were either monosyllabic grunts or just a bunch of loud, unintelligible, meaningless noise. Unless I was able to see a person’s mouth when they spoke, I could not make sense of what I was hearing.
LaRonda,
I was reading some of your descriptions of losing your hearing, using [hearing aids], etc… I could understand a bit.
My hearing has been diminishing gradually since 1995 when I got a really bad ear infection that caused permanent hearing loss in my left ear. Now my right ear has caught up with the loss and both ears are not hearing so well. I tried hearing aids and I had the exact experience that you described in which I could hear the turning of a page, of the shifting of people’s bodies in a chair as excruciatingly loud etc… But the voices that I wanted to hear were tinny and tunnel like in my perception. I ended up with a headache whenever I used them. I gave up and thought, “It’s better not to hear, then to endure this.”
Gradually, I have adjusted, though my husband hasn’t. He gets so frustrated with me because I mishear consonants at the beginning of words a lot. I can’t distinguish between many sounds and he is a mumbler and tends to swallow the end of his sentences anyway. He always has and he has gotten worse as he has aged. Both of my girls are pretty loud, so I don’t have much trouble hearing them.
In groups, the speaking of many individuals just sounds like noise to me. I can’t distinguish individuals speaking. Restaurants are impossible. Speaking on the telephone is the best way for me to hear what someone is saying to me. I can turn up the volume and hear pretty clearly.
Anonymous
Left by Anonymous on January 22nd, 2007