Water and the machine

I had an adventure this past Thursday night and Friday morning.

My hearing aid stopped working. 

This is always a curious experience, because not only is it a machine, it's also my hearing.  When a machine breaks down, you're appropriately put-out while you run through the list of possible reasons.  On the other hand, when your hearing breaks down, a host of other, more dire, concerns pushes to the forefront: am I losing what little hearing I have left? have I been afflicted with some disease of the ear?  will I be able to continue my present job if I'm completely deaf?  will I ever hear the birds again?!

I had to wait until the audiologist's office opened Friday morning.  When you have to wait, your concerns tend to multiply and take over your existence.  Thursday night and early Friday morning I kept clicking my tongue and calling the cats, just to assure myself that what little hearing I had was still functional (it was...but I had to be sure).  During the half hour drive to the audiologist's office, I started over-analyzing every vibration in the car, almost certain it was going to break down on me.

Then I told myself to get over it, shoved all my little worries into the back of my head, and let my mind wander.  Thinking is a lot easier when you don't have any sounds to distract you.  I can't recall most of what I daydreamed--for all I know, I was close to figuring out the meaning of life.  Then I got to the audiologist, where she pulled out a box of what looked like torture devices, fiddled around with the tubes of my hearing aid, poked out a 1/4 inch filter and restored my hearing. 

"These things are more trouble than they're worth," she said, holding up the tiny slip of filter, which had become logged with moisture.  Moisture is what obstructed my hearing.  I couldn't help but feel a new-found appreciation for the elements of nature.  We construct all manner of devices to overcome the inconveniences that nature puts in our way, and she can still manage to be inconvenient.

Man and the machine

I feel like a cyborg with this new hearing aid.

All these controls and buttons, such a finely attuned machine that works to convert the chaos of noise into a comprehensible string of sound, and it still doesn't compare to a normal person's hearing, even though it's improving things on my end.

It's better than my old hearing aid, especially in picking out the nuggets of voices out of the vast turmoil of noise (I was so surprised that I could actually hear a patron over the screeches and whirrings coming from the construction of the new library wing, that I forgot to listen to what she was saying).

I'm still adjusting, but it's been good so far.

Adjustments

I've been wearing my new hearing aid for almost a week now. My audiologist made some adjustments to it this morning, mainly the fix the problem of "squishing."

"Squishing" is when the hearing aid, in an attempt to make what it perceives as loud sounds more comfortable, compresses the sound. Sometimes this works, but in my case, it was making a lot of sounds, mainly people's voices, muffled. So we'll see how it does.

So far, it works for me. I'm still getting used to hearing more 'soft' sounds, like paper crumpling, pens clicking against the table, fingers tapping at the keyboard. At first, they seemed to interfere with people's voices, but when I thought about it, I realized that I could still understand people, my brain just had to adjust to picking their voices out of the sea of sounds.

Hearing is more than just an ear taking in sound waves. There's a lot of brain work involved as those sounds have to be processed, some noises being tossed into the 'white noise' category, other sounds receiving preferential treatment, and still others being completely ignored so that my conscious part no longer notices them. We all do this naturally, but when there's an adjustment process, it can be a little perplexing.

A new order

I've had my new hearing aid for about 3 hours so far.

Some good things:
-I can hear
-There appears to be better distinction between types of sounds, but I have yet to distinguish it (i.e. I have yet to adjust)
-I do not look like this model from the Phonak hearing aid ad



What is different:
-Some things are louder than others, in strange ways: the crumple of paper is much louder than a voice (which my audiologist may adjust if this doesn't go away)

When I walked out of the office and into the main part of the KY Clinic, it felt like I was entering a war zone, where one side had dragons that they were using to great effect: it was that loud! Everyone else was walking along, oblivious to the war they were in the middle of.

When I went into Kroger's, there were the dragons again, along with airplanes taking off: it was that loud! Jon thinks it must be the ventilation system.

Obviously, I have a lot of adjusting to do. I go back for a hearing aid tweak next week. There may be more tweaking to do after that. It will probably take up to half a year to become completely used to this hearing aid. But I'm optimistic for several reasons:
-I can hear
-I can understand Jon
-I can hear Pope's mews

We don't realize how much we rely on simple things until they are threatened.

Get the wiggles out

This is the kind of hearing aid I once wore a long time ago (at school):


No, we did not dance around in our underwear. These children are reacting to rhythms they feel in the floor. I tried to find a better picture of body-worn hearing aids, but this is the only one that came up.

And now, hearing aids have to be cool. I find the idea of marketing hearing aids as "sexy cool" rather strange, as they are such a necessary part of my life, almost on the same level as bread and water. Are canes and walkers ever advertised this way? (Note that the models are not actually wearing the hearing aids).

Everything's changing

I've made an appointment to see about getting a new hearing aid. Exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time.

Nerve-wracking because I'm accustomed to my current prop and leery of the adjustment period the new machine will require. My brain will have to retrain itself on the new sounds coming in, so similar and yet not to what I once heard. I don't enjoy change.

The memory of my initial acquaintance with my current hearing aid is still fresh--how I hated that thing! Everything seemed so soft and muted. When the audiologist said that this is actually quite similar to how normal people hear, that everything isn't so magnified (who pays attention to the ruffle of papers on the desk, or the quiet rumble of the dishwasher, anyways?), I couldn't believe that normal hearing could be so frustratingly boring.

The wow factor of the hearing aid lay not in its amplification power, but in its ability to tease out the various frequencies of sound, to suppress background noise and bring human voices to the fore. It took me a long time to appreciate that kind of technology.