Ear Job (3): Tinnitus

[This is the next installment in what appears to be a series of ongoing posts about my experiences with ears, hearing aids, and hearing in general. If you missed the earlier bits, feel free to backtrack to Part 2 (on hearing aids); there’s a link there to the first part.]

While preparing to write this post, I went back and read the previous two on the same topic. Lo and behold, I couldn’t help noticing what was, for me, a classic evasion. To wit:

If you were to write a shorthand transcript of my hearing-aid experiences based on nothing but those two posts — and you knew nothing about shorthand, but maybe just enough about HTML and such to be clever, if not outright dangerous — it might read something like this:

stuff leading up to first hearing aid
FIRST HEARING AID
mumblemumblemumblemumble
FIRST WHIZ-BANG HEARING AID
etc.

I’ve gotta clear up that mumblemumble stuff, if I’m to be honest here (with you and with myself).

As I said in those earlier posts, I got my first hearing aid at age 12, when I was in seventh grade. Wasn’t crazy about it, mind you, because my hair was real short — crewcut or “flattop” short — and I knew or even saw no one else even remotely my age who wore a hearing aid. (Kids worry about the weirdest stuff, you know.) (And yes, some of us carry that habit into adulthood. Don’t change the subject.)

Whatever else I could say about it, that hearing aid was one rugged device. I wore it in the shower a few times, and got caught in who-knows-how-many rainstorms. I retrieved it from the mouth of at least one family pet. Every now and then when I was tired of wearing it, I’d take it off and stick it in a pocket of my pants… and then forget it until Mom fished it out of the bottom of the washing-machine tub, post-laundering.

“Will you please leave that goddam hearing aid on your ear?” Dad would plead. “And take it off before it gets wet?”

Eventually I figured out the leave-it-on, no, take-it-off balance pretty well. Life was calm.

And then I went to high school.

How painfully self-conscious can someone be who — in the grand scheme of things — really doesn’t have much to feel self-conscious about?

Marta has recently been mulling over one’s (dis)comfort with his or her appearance, citing her own self-consciousness of her height in a previous post and the general matter of “looks” in the most recent one. Without even thinking about it, I know with utter certainty that if we’d been the same generation and attended the same school, my early-teenage self would have cringed to walk into a room and find her there — not because of anything about her, mind you, but simply because she was a girl and I was a boy… with a wad of molded plastic in his ear, and something that looked very much like a fresh oyster (sans shell) behind his ear.

So I started to wear the aid less and less. (To put it another way, it went through more and more loads of dark laundry.) By college, I wasn’t wearing it much at all. By the time I got the diploma, uh… what hearing aid?

So there I was, out in the work force. A few odd jobs and then, of all things, teaching English and journalism. I did “man up” (as the saying goes) and talk about my hearing with the folks who hired me there, and I did go back to wearing the hearing aid as a precondition of employment. All again was well.

…at least, until I left teaching. Through one more odd job and another, the hearing aid started to spend more time in a dresser drawer again. All the way up to about the middle of my first job as a programmer — and manager of programmers — with AT&T in the mid-1980s.

All the way, that is, up to the point when the tinnitus kicked in. Kicked in big-time.

If you’ve never heard of tinnitus before and wonder what it might be, perhaps it will help to think of this excerpt from Poe’s “The Bells,” which features a related word (and in part recreates the experience):

…the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells —
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Yes: bells, bells, bells, bells, jingling tinkling bells bells bells: tinnitus is the maddening condition, often accompanying a hearing loss, in which the ears ring (or hiss, or buzz, or…), and keep on doing so for hours, days, or even indefinitely. (To my knowledge, it’s incurable. Either it comes and goes on its own, or it arrives and sets up housekeeping for good.) A familiar trope of sensory experience goes, “The noise was so loud that it made my ears ring.” How tinnitus differs from this common complaint is that there is no external noise. The ear just starts going “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…” (or “Ssssssssss,” or whatever), on its own.

I’d had tinnitus off and on throughout my life but it never really got out of hand until I was in my mid-30s. There’d be a slight boost in pressure in one ear or the other, and then the ee’ing would start. But I always had at least one “partial ear” to keep me going until the sound stopped.

Weirdly, I had long ago found that (in my case, anyhow) I could “make it go away” in an ostensibly easy manner: by not paying attention to it. Specifically, I’d found that the act of getting absorbed in reading worked wonders. I’d take a book or a magazine to some quiet corner — a lavatory stall if all else failed — and just start reading. Soon, maybe within ten or fifteen minutes, I’d suddenly become aware that the noise was gone.

No hearing professional I’ve ever talked to about this said that it made any sense, and maybe it doesn’t. But that was how it worked for me. So when I got to my mid-30s, comfortably ensconced in my techie niche, and the tinnitus fired up, I’d escape with a notepad and the printout of a particularly thorny program — to the cafeteria, say, where I’d go to the table all the way in the back. I’d debug the thing until its and my separate problems went away. And then I’d go back to my office.

Trouble was, the episodes were lengthening. My boss would stop by my office and ask a colleague, “Where’s John?” “Don’t know.” A half-hour later this process would be repeated. And so on.

And my promotion to management solved some problems — the pay was wonderful — but cooked my truth-evasive goose for good: I couldn’t simply get up in the middle of a meeting, unannounced, and flee to bathroom or cafeteria for a half-hour or more.

More than anything else, that’s what drove me to get a real hearing aid: one which (in my case) provided me hearing in both ears, but also masked the tinnitus in the ringing ear — let me “hear through” the episodes, as it were.

I’m sure occasional tinnitus continues to afflict me. But I don’t notice it anymore. And that, gentle reader — more than any other reason — that is why I am determined to wear hearing aids for good.