Ear Job

Running After My Hat passed one milestone this week: the hundredth post. (I’m not sure which surprises me more — that it’s (a) that many, or (b) that few.)

Yesterday I realized I’d passed another milestone, of sorts.

After uploading the wonder-of-waterfalls entry, I was getting ready for work. I’d already showered and was now drying my hair. Since I’ve been growing it long, it naturally takes longer to dry and thus affords me more time to think. And I was thinking back, this time, about some of the wording in the waterfalls thing. Specifically this brief passage: “And as I made my way along the trail, I found myself enthralled by the sound of the water. Water ran everywhere, in all those delicious-sounding verbs like trickle, babble, and plash.” Sort of wishing I’d come up with more examples, you see.

As I wrapped the cord around the hair dryer, though, what jumped out at me from those two sentences wasn’t the phrase at the end. It was two phrases in the middle: sound of the water and delicious-sounding.

Sound. Sounding. They jumped out at me just as I was putting the hearing aids in.

As it turns out, I’ve mentioned before that I wear hearing aids. (Until checking just now, I didn’t remember having done even that much.) But I’ve never blogged about hearing itself — or how I came to wear aids in the first place, and what it’s like, and, and, and…

This wasn’t a conscious omission. I just honestly, well, don’t think about it that much anymore. I’d guess that nearly all the people who know about it don’t think about it much, either — these hearing aids have enabled the subject to recede that far into the background (though not to disappear entirely). And because I’ve worn my hair fairly long my whole adult life, most people don’t even know I’ve been wearing hearing aids that whole time.

I can often tell when the revelation hits somebody the first time. We’ll be talking and I’ll absent-mindedly reach up to scratch an ear. Or I’ll turn to the side in such a way that my hair pulls back, momentarily. There’s a sudden realignment of the other person’s facial features; they seem to be focusing, hard, on the bridge of my nose or my eyebrows or chin.

Intently not focusing on — indeed not even looking at — the side of my head.

It’s really not a big secret, although at certain times in my past I’d happily talk about anything but. Nowadays, if I’m going to be working with someone, I always make a point of alerting them to the hearing impairment. And if it’s just someone I might see socially, like the people The Missus works with, I’ll more or less casually slip the words hearing aids and both ears into the conversation.

This is insurance, see. It’s laying the groundwork for some future moment when s/he asks me what I do for a living, say, and I answer, “I know — I can’t believe how hot it is, either!”

When younger, I wanted no one to know that I was hearing-impaired. This was vanity, partially. (Which, yes, is stupid. Like wanting no one to know about your bad eyesight.)

But also it was partially, well… painfully overly considerate, avoiding a “slight” which would never ever actually occur to someone else. The litany ran through my head, sometimes in so many words: If So-and-So suddenly finds out you might not hear him, he’ll wonder what he might have said in the past that he’d thought you agreed to, or that you understood, but were really just faking your way through. He’ll know you weren’t paying attention. You’ll have insulted him.

Attention. That’s the key word there, and it’s exactly wrong there. I was in fact paying attention, way too much. Rather than focusing on hearing someone, I was thinking ahead and thinking hard, like: Okay, given what we’re talking about in general, and what the context is, and what I already know about this person and about myself and where we are and what we’ve already talked about not just now but ever — given all that, what did he just ask me? (I used to joke — just among people who knew about the hearing, of course — that I always provided the right answers, they’d just asked the wrong questions.)

So anyway: attention.

The protagonist of my first book, a woman named Finley, was hearing-impaired and (like the author) wore an aid in each ear. At one point, the book mentions that in Finley’s opinion, hearing is first and foremost an act of attention, even more than a physical/neurological response. The idea (for me and Finley, anyhow) is this: By all means talk to us. If talking to us in person, face us, preferably, so we can attend to your facial expressions and do whatever lip-reading we can. And if our attention is focused elsewhere — on the TV, at a movie theater, in a stadium or concert hall, simply driving — be prepared for a lag as we shift from attending to one thing, to attending to you.

Here’s probably the most frequently asked question I get: “Have you always had a hearing problem?” (Sometimes this question comes out differently: “How long have you known?,” say, or “Do you have any idea what caused it?”)

In my case, I first found out something might be “wrong” when I was in first grade. My teacher, Mrs. Burkholder brought it up to my parents at the so-called “Back-to-School Night,” a few months into the school year. She’d noticed that when she was facing the blackboard, or reading to the class with the book held up so it hid her mouth, I often didn’t get whatever she was saying. (For decades, it has dumbfounded me that anyone could pick up on this, based on what had to have been a fairly small sample.)

Before Mrs. Burkholder, as far as I’ve ever known, no sign of hearing loss ever presented itself. And even afterwards, I heard pretty well. Somehow, after all, I absorbed the lyrics to a thousand commercial jingles (“My dog’s better than your dog/My dog’s better than yours/My dog’s better ’cause he eats Ken’l Ration/My dog’s better than yours”) and TV shows (“A horse is a horse/Of course, of course/And no one can talk to a horse of course…”). My speech isn’t impaired, either — a frequent sign of early deafness or hearing impairment.

And no: no idea what caused it. Mine is in the mysterious category called “nerve deafness,” which sometimes seems a category of ailment like “upset stomach”: an umbrella term meaning, effectively, We don’t have a more specific term for it and We can’t cure it, but we can treat the symptoms.

I’ll revisit this from time to time; I’ve a bunch of good stories to share, about doctors, audiologists, different types of hearing aids, and “the hearing thing” in general. In the meantime, if anyone reading this wants to know anything else about it, ask away. It’s not a sensitive subject at all, not for me, not anymore. Especially ’cause I don’t actually have to hear you in the comments. :)

Update, 2008-10-01: I’ve got a new post here, on my experience(s) with hearing aids.