Living with another person is often a joy and often a pain in the ass. Roommates discover this really fast.
Typically if you’re not in the mood for beer bongs, and crazy parties, you head to your space and close the door or you leave the apartment / house / whatever and find someplace that you want to be.
If that other person is a spouse it’s not so easy to just ignore them.
Well, it’s easy but there are of course consequences.
“I told you about this dinner 2 weeks ago! Why don’t you ever listen to me?”
“No you didn’t tell me about any damn dinner. I was going out drinking with the guys. You know this is the one Friday a month that we get together and blow off some steam.“
“I don’t understand how your friends are more important than what I want to do.”
Sound familiar?
Yeah, this was getting to be the new “normal” for conversations around here. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought damn!
Glasses, too damn many doctors, prescription drugs and now my hearing is shot.
So after considerable thought, I did what every guy does.
I ignored it!
Until I happened to run across an article about the rugby player turned anti bullying activist Ben Cohen.
Turns out Ben has a pretty significant hearing loss. It wasn’t clear if that hearing loss was due to rugby, or was congenital. However Ben met Sir Elton John at a charity event and I suppose Sir Elton noticed the telltale signs of hearing loss in Ben.
Sir Elton, sponsors a charity that helps people dealing with hearing loss get what they need to lead “normal” lives.
The article went on to say that Ben Cohen who’s a young guy, had hearing aids that he rarely wore because in crowded rooms, and events they simply didn’t work very well.
With a little help, and a little arranging from Sir Elton, Ben ended up at Starkey (I linked their hearing foundation web site there.)
The article said that Ben went to one of their facilities for an evaluation and some in-depth testing.
The upshot was that Ben got new hearing aids that worked properly, and because they work correctly he’s wearing them much more often.
The first person I ever had really close contact with who wore hearing aids is a diver I met on a scuba trip. We ended up as room-mates from the duration of the trip. I honestly don’t know if he gets how much he educated me and the dive group.
I never realized that crowds, and restaurants were problems for folks with hearing aids. I never realized how delicate and prone to failure some hearing aids are.
While on the trip one of my friends hearing aids went down. We were out of the US so it wasn’t like he could run to a repair facility.
In crowds, because the hearing aid amplifies all sounds, and in some cases shifts the amplified sounds to frequencies the person can hear, often all the person hears is noise. It’s overwhelming.
For folks with “Normal” hearing we focus on the frequencies that are of interest to us. The sound of a voice or voices across a table, for instance.
Our brain ignores all the extraneous sounds on other frequencies and allows us to pick out a conversation. Face it, our brain is a marvelous computer. To simulate that ability with a machine is a tall task, yet our brains and ears do it with ease, naturally, and effortlessly.
But how do you do that if you only have half the frequencies to work with? How do you tell a machine what you really want to focus on? How do you make that machine shift what you want to focus on into a range that you can hear?
My friend, simply left his hearing aids in the hotel room. He preferred to read lips in crowds and restaurants. It made his evening a lot more enjoyable.
When he let the group know he was essentially deaf, we all made sure that during dive briefings he had clear unobstructed views of the dive master so he knew what the plan was.
I was really amazed at how easily our group adapted to and accommodated his needs. We didn’t baby, or coddle him we just made sure he could read our lips when it was appropriate. He for his part, never demanded any special treatment he simply explained to us what he needed.
I really like and respect him for his understatement.
As a person my friend is funny, charming, witty, and genuinely wonderful. I like being around him and will dive with him anywhere, anytime. I also forget that he’s mostly deaf. Until he starts signing at me underwater… (but that’s a different story.)
In any case after reading the article about Ben I thought fuck! If he can man up and my dive friend can live so normally, I can at least go have my hearing tested to find out what the problem is.
So I called a hearing test place, made an appointment and showed up at the appropriate time and place.
45 minutes later the audiologist tells me that my hearing is excellent. Not only is it excellent, but I don’t appear to have any loss in frequency spectrum either.
I got a nice printed copy of the test results and was told to keep taking care of my ears.
Honestly I’m very pleased with the results.
Except for one small thing…
Now I have no excuse when I don’t pay attention to what the other half is saying.
I tried to hide the paper (like a poor report card) but it’s been found and I’ve been asked about it.
Damn!