I CAN’T HEAR YOU
Hear only the things you should hear – be deaf to others.
Ford Frick
I know it drives you crazy. You walk into your parents’ home and the television is so loud you can hear it across the street.
You call Aunt Bertha and she cannot make out one word you are saying. You ask “How are you?” and she says, “But I LIKE Jews.” By the time you repeat “How is your sciatica?” twenty times, you don’t care anymore.
The guy in line behind you sneezes and you say, “Do you have a cold?” He says “I KNOW I’m old; you don’t have to remind me.”
Why on earth don’t these people wear their hearing aids?
I cannot speak for every older person who discovers he isn’t hearing the way he once did, but I can speak for myself. Perhaps my story will explain why we buy those hearing aids, try them for a week and then put them in a bureau drawer.
Nine years ago, I noticed that I confused numbers and I would give ridiculous answers to people’s questions. My friend tried on a new dress and said, “How do I look?” and I said,” I haven’t read anything good either.” When my dentist told me I had a cavity I thought he said I suffered from depravity. There is a lovely 8 year old child who tells me long involved stories every time she visits and I can honestly say I have never heard a world she has said…ever.
You get the picture.
It took four years of wandering through quiet streets and standing outside silent playgrounds to convince me that I needed some kind of device to clarify what was being said. The evening I appeared at River Dance in my nightgown because I thought it was a sleepover, I knew drastic action was in order. . Something expensive would have to be done or I would wander around in a cloud of silence while the rest of the world got all the news.
It was time to go explore the world of hearing aids. I discovered that the way the establishment gets back at decaying seniors for all those discounts and free services the ARARP managed to get for them is to charge triple or quadruple their own cost for eye glasses and hearing aids. For some strange reason, our government doesn’t think hearing and seeing are necessary to live the good life. Most people over seventy are living on pensions that are a fraction of the income they once enjoyed. They think twice before buying anything in three figures. They experience a dangerous surge of blood pressure when the cost of anything is four figures. I am one of those people.
I shopped and compared prices for several months until I found cheapest hearing aids I thought would do the job. They cost $5000 for the pair. The audiologist explained that if I got only one hearing aid, I would be lopsided. Did she say I was misguided? I wasn’t exactly sure, but I got her message. It was $5000 to hear again or silence.
I had heard stories of seemingly sensible people who bought hearing aids, worn them for a week and shoved them in a bureau drawer and I said (with great conviction) “I am not spending $5000 for something I don’t use. Not me.”
The lovely girl who tested me said these hearing aids were state of the art and I believed her. When I was in her office, I managed to make out a couple of the words she said after she inserted the aids, but after all I hadn’t heard 40% of the sounds around me for so many years. It would take me a bit of time to recognize them again. I knew if I worked at it “BLGHXBL!!” would once again sound like the “hello” I once recognized when I was young.
My first hurdle was trying to get the things in my ear. It seemed easy enough with the audiologist helping me but when I got home, I simply couldn’t figure out which one went where. There is a funny angle to the ear canal and I have always been really bad at getting things in narrow passages. I can’t get keys in locks. I could never manage tampons. I pulled on my ear lobe and pushed and said a dirty word, but the device kept landing in the sink.
However, I was not throwing $5000 dollars down the drain even though I almost sent one of the hearing aids there. When I finally managed to shove both of them in my ears without piercing my eardrum, I sat down to eat and I was horrified. I had never heard my teeth make so much clatter. They sounded like a thundering herd of cattle coming home for dinner. I could hear myself swallow. I heard my stomach attempting to digest and I actually jumped when my stomach growled. The problem was that I still couldn’t hear anything my dinner partner was saying.
So I went back to the audiologist for some adjustments. She fiddled, she adjusted, she tested and out I went to try again. I wore these aids another 12 hours when I heard THE loudest ring I had ever heard in my life and realized it was a warning that the battery needed changing. I was in a movie theater at the time (still not hearing what the characters were saying) so I couldn’t take them out to change the batteries. Five minutes later, the ring was so loud and insistent, the person next to me screamed ( I heard THAT) and then…silence.
I came home, shoved the hearing aids in the bureau drawer and refused to even look at them until two years later when I said to myself. “Remember the days when you actually heard what the cashier said instead of fainting when you saw the receipt? Give those things one more try.”
And I did. I finally caught on to the three adjustments I had to make for noise levels. I still didn’t feel like I was getting the aids in right, but at least they didn’t fall out of my ear. This was progress. I must have visited the audiologist at least twenty times in the next two months determined not to throw away $5000 dollars and even more determined to hear words.
And then I gave up. No matter how many times they were adjusted, no matter how many times I tried, I still couldn’t hear what I really wanted to hear: conversation.
It is now five years later. I REALLY can’t hear what is going on. I know I must take the plunge and try to get a hearing aid that works and I know technology has advanced. In the past few years, I have gone to several other audiologists all of whom tell me that the devices I bought are third rate and theirs (which cost $7000-$10,000) are far more sophisticated. When they see me turn pale and clutch my heart, they say, “But why not try these once more?”…and I always do …and I still don’t hear words. ….just strange noises that don’t make sense.
Now anyone that has a hearing aid that wears it will tell you they are not perfect devices. Everyone has a different kind of hearing loss and mine evidently is unique to medical science. I have to say though I have never heard anyone ever tell me they LOVE their hearing aid until this past month.
I don’t want to strain to hear every word that said to me. I don’t want my voice to sound so loud people step back when I speak. None of us do. I don’t like asking you to repeat every sentence you say two or three times. It is embarrassing. But I would be willing to bet 99% of the deaf people who drive you mad because they won’t help themselves had exactly the same experience I had. Sitting in the drawer, covered with dust is an expensive mistake they really tried to wear. My generation hates to throw money away.
So now you know. We don’t wear our hearing aids because we just can’t make them work.
