My Journey of hearing loss
Unfortunately, hearing aids are not like glasses, meaning they will not restore your hearing to normal.
It was a senior year in my college in the US I started understanding less what my teachers were saying but I thought it was because I sat far from them. I started having trouble to understand my roommate if she was talking to me from the other room. One of my friends also joked that I need to get my ears checked. Then, I went to university hospital audiologist and got a hearing test. She told me that I have mild bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and suggested on getting hearing aids. As I was driving back home, tears couldn’t stop rolling down as I was so shocked that this really is happening to me. I called in sick at work and just stayed home. Suddenly, I started hearing screeching noise and I was not sure where it was coming from. I had to turn on some music to stop paying attention to that noise. That noise has not stopped to this day! In my follow up visit with the audiologist, I found out, that noise was called tinnitus which is ringing in the ears. I am not sure if the shock on that day triggered my tinnitus or I always had it.
Loss is the experience of having something taken away or destroyed. If someone is born deaf, they do not know what it feels like to be hearing, deafness becomes the normal. However, if you have hearing loss later in life, you have a new normal and you need to learn to adapt to it. It may become devastating and may take time to accept that fact. This is the story of my journey of hearing loss.
My sister and I were both born as hearing. My dad started having hearing loss during his late twenties. Then it was followed by my sister around same age. We thought it was due to her middle ear infections as a kid, which is pretty common during childhood. We did not connect this to be hereditary of any kind. Then, at my late twenties I started showing symptoms of hearing loss. It took me quite some time to accept the fact that I am hard-of-hearing. I was in denial. I was so ashamed to tell everyone like I had HIV or something. I couldn’t picture myself wearing hearing aids and I couldn’t afford them as well. I was an international student studying in US and my insurance did not cover them. I kept putting it off. I graduated college with biomedical Science degree. I chose blood banking for my masters and moved to Virginia. Again, I was having some trouble hearing my teachers in class. I went to see university audiologist again. She said the same thing previous audiologist said and advised on getting hearing aids. One pair of hearing aid cost 1500$ and I couldn’t afford them. I decided on getting one hearing aid for my right ear and they let me pay in installment. My audiologist did say I have bilateral hearing loss so getting one hearing aid would be like wearing glasses in one eye but at that point of life as a grad student under heavy student loans, that’s all I could afford!
Time went on, I felt little easier to talk about it, admit that I have hearing loss and I knew it was going to progress in the same manner like my father and sister’s hearing loss had progressed. Today, I am at moderate to severe stage. Hearing aids help on amplifying the volume but they do not give perfect hearing like eyeglasses does for vision correctness. I need subtitles to watch TV otherwise I can not understand them. Brain does this to us, if you can’t hear for certain time of period, it starts to think, it doesn’t need it anymore and stops hearing that word altogether! I did not realize until this Covid-19 time, how much I needed to look at person’s lips. Now that everyone is wearing their mask, it becomes very frustrating to communicate.
I work in a blood bank in US. My work has accommodated me with a special phone that connects with my hearing aids. I am grateful for Human resource law here in US that accommodates disabled workers. In Nepal, there is no such law to help or protect their employees. This is also one of the reasons, I do not want to return back. People are also not considerate about talking to deaf or hard of hearing folks.
When you have hearing loss, conversation is like a game of Wheel Of Fortune. Some of the letters are blank. Others are filled in. People with hearing loss take these incomplete sounds and put them into words or phrases that make sense in the context of the conversation. It doesn’t always work, leaving us isolated and alone. The pandemic made this worse, as masks took away our superpower — lipreading. We struggle to fit into the hearing world, yet there is a silver lining — meeting one another.
Because hearing loss usually occurs so gradually, most people find ways to cope with it. Some are exceptionally good at bluffing or “filling in the blanks” of conversations-until they just can’t cover it up anymore. Most people who have a hearing problem don’t realize what a drag it can be for your spouse and friends. Continually asking them to “hear for you” or “be your ears,” and at the same time making mistakes during basic communication, just isn’t fun. If you had a friend with bad eyesight who kept bumping into furniture or falling down or misreading important labels, you’d make them visit an eye doctor. For some reason, this kind of cause-and-effect social pressure doesn’t always apply when it comes to hearing loss.
Humans are social animals, and we use our hearing for many important things. In particular, when you start to remove a person’s ability to communicate well-and create strain, anxiety, and problems for them in communicating with their spouse, friends, relatives, or co-workers-it shouldn’t be a shock that bad things happen. Untreated hearing loss robs us of our self-confidence, spontaneity, independence and, frankly, many of the things that make life joyful. It can also hinder your academic performance, career, and earnings. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that all kinds of studies-research going back more than three decades now-show that better hearing leads to a better quality of life. I follow research on sensorineural hearing loss and I am hopeful something will come up in few years. Cochlear implant is also my option down the road.
Whatever option I may choose, I have learnt to adapt to it, live with it. And that’s why I’ll bring readers back to where I started: you only have about 12,000 hair cells in your inner ear for hearing. When those cells die, you don’t get them back. So don’t burn them foolishly. And be sure to get your hearing tested, and seek help if you think you might have a hearing loss.
