Holiday Noise Polution and Q-tip resolution update

The holidays for most people involves many people in a small space and lots of noise. For me that equals isolation. More people equates to more noise which equates to more difficulty in understanding. Add that to the chaos of gifts being open, wrappers crinkling, music playing in the background, and I'm lucky if I can follow any of the conversations.

I've learned the skills of sitting and nodding, smiling absently, and only asking for clarification when it's absolutely necessary.

Therefore I prefer a quiet and small holiday setting. It's hard to come across these settings as families continue to grow and the important members swell. At least during the December holidays I'll have a gift or two to open and play with when my ears give out on me.

As for the Q-tips: Knowing that I would be quitting come Jan 1 I went back to using them this past week. I tried to be gentle but I know that is still not enough. Since I'm home today and feeling a cold coming on I may not even wear my hearing aids today. If I don't wear them for two days in a row that should decrease on the moisture and will hopefully make the transition easier. If I do wear my hearing aids today rest assured they will be off prior to midnight so that I can have one last enjoyable swabbing.

New Year’s Resolution:

I am a week early but I feel it’s time to start planning my New Year’s Resolution. Overall I plan to be more motivated, since this will affect all areas of my life and not just a simple resolution that is so easy to break. I do have two specific resolutions in addition:

1) To be better with this blog. It has been running on almost E practically since I started. So my plan for 2009 is to write one entry a week, or at least 2 entries per month. Check in and see how I do, this will be one resolution that will be blatantly obvious when it fails.

2) To quit using Q-tips. I had almost succeeded a month ago. I had been sick and not worn my hearing aids for several days, therefore the grease content of my ears was relatively mild. But I do love the feeling of a Q-tip right after taking my hearing aids off and I fell back into my bad habit rather quickly. Fast forward to today where I have irritated my right ear so badly I can’t wear my hearing aid. To add insult to injury I have my annual physical this afternoon and am destined to receive a lecture from my doctor once she looks into my ears.

My Q-tip addiction will be a struggle. With no disrespect to smokers I equate it to breaking the nicotine addiction. For a smoker they enjoy smoking but need to stop due to health reasons (or a variety of other reasons I am sure). For me I enjoy Q-tips but am obviously hurting myself in the process and need to stop. I am giving myself a week to try and stop, but come January 1st I plan on going cold turkey.

I’m sure a great deal of my January entries will be related to Q-tip withdrawal. My biggest issue is that even if I don’t use Q-tips I will often stick my fingers in my ears. I may need to purchase gloves to wear inside the house.
A Happy Holidays to all who may be reading. Wish me luck as I begin this journey. Luck is also needed in getting my right ear able to wear it’s hearing aid so that I can hear and enjoy the holidays.

Expensive adventures foreseen

I am having trouble hearing out of my left hearing aid. The sound is muffled and I have the urge to turn the sound up even though there are no volume controls. Yet I am hearing all right. The battery concerns me: I think my battery life is diminished and I changing batteries more often. All signs lead towards needing to bring my hearing aid in to be checked up. The problem is that my warranty expired in April.

I am dragging my feet on getting this checked out. I know it will more than likely need to be sent back to the shop to be repaired. In that case it will cost a couple hundred dollars. Having just replaced our furnace at home I really was not looking forward to another big-ticket expense.

To complicate factors further my audiologist is not close to my home or my work. I love this place dearly but the location does cause me to put off visits.

I need to just call and set up an appointment and take time off from work to get my hearing aid fixed. Especially now before the holidays are in full swing and I’m without my hearing aid as it gets repaired. Seeing as my left ear is my strong ear I’m really lost without my hearing aid. I have my old aid that I could use, but for family functions where sound is difficult I would still be struggling.
Tomorrow I will call and set up some time to bring my hearing aid in. What ever is wrong with my hearing aid I have been suspecting for a couple of weeks now. This means it is not going to go away, just get worse. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it’s something simple, something easy to take care of. I won’t be holding my breath.

My Love Affair with Q-tips

I have a very special relationship with Q-tips. I use them every day to clean out my ears. After taking off my hearing aids I cannot get to them fast enough. My ears are rather greasy with the hearing aids in, so when I take them off they have a very wet feeling. I can master two Q-tips, one in each ear, at the same time. And they are both cleaning rather fast. It’s a very pleasant and enjoyable experience that keeps me coming back for more.

When I was a teenager I started to have some oozing in my right ear. It was a few years later that I realized that this was due to the Q-tips. Unbeknownst to myself Q-tips are on the list of no-no’s. They hurt the ear and cause issues.

I have spent the past 10 years trying to quit. I fail. Badly. I love my Q-tips. Now after I am done cleaning my ears hurt and they continue to have the oozing problem. But I can’t stop. I may not have many vices but this one is big, and I am addicted.

I managed to quit for a period of about a month. It was just prior to my wedding and I developed an infection from my Q-tip habit. I couldn’t even wear my hearing aids never mind use a Q-tip. I was proud of myself; though it was unpleasant I had finally broken the habit.

At this point I learned that my Q-tip habit caused my ear to swell. Without the habit my hearing aids didn’t fit. My right mold would slide repeatedly out of my ear and emit a high-pitched sound as it did so. I didn’t have enough time to get a new mold before the wedding and none of my old molds fit. My family came up with one simple solution: start using the Q-tips again.

So I went back to my bad habit. It helped but not enough: my wedding video shows me pushing my hearing aid in multiple times. Once I got a new mold I tried to quit again and failed.

In fact, I have tried on and off for the past year to quit. I get a good streak going and then I come home after a long day. I’m tired, I’m stressed, and my ears are very moist. I take off my hearing aids and ignore the Q-tip ritual. A few minutes later my fingers will be in my ears or I will have succumbed to the Q-tip. It’s not attractive but it’s a habit.

I need to join a Q-tip Anonymous group. That is if I can ever find another person who loves it the same as me. It’s very sad that I have to give up something I find so pleasurable. Yet every night my ears are red and inflamed and I know I am in for more trouble the following day.
Just say no to Q-tips if you can. If you can’t come join Q.A. with me, we can discuss which brands work best.

Identity, Language, and Culture

I grew up with the term “hearing impaired” to describe myself. I knew my hearing loss meant I was disabled, but I never full accepted myself as a disabled person. Rather I felt I was different from the norm. I remember being a child and looking at the handicapped parking spaces and pondering that while I was technically handicapped I certainly didn’t fit the description for the parking space. Even at a young age I rejected the handicapped mentality for myself.

I didn’t know many other people with a hearing loss. My mother tells me that I refused to meet a family friend’s daughter that had a hearing loss like me. I don’t remember this occurrence. I do remember that my 2nd grade recess aide wore two hearing aids. She was the dreaded mean aide so there was not a feeling of connection to her.

While I was in high school my views towards my hearing loss were less than pleasant. It was difficult for me to socialize in large, noisy groups; so I often sat and waiting for a close friend to talk with me one-on-one. I felt like a bit of an outcast, someone that boys would not want to date and a burden on my friends.

I ended up going to college after my sophomore year of high school. It was a small school with a lot of opportunity for one-on-one time with the teachers. It was a really good match for my hearing. More than that they allowed me to take American Sign Language as my foreign language requirement. I had struggled with Spanish in high school and was looking forward to something that wouldn’t be as hard to hear.

Over the summer I took my first sign language class. My mother joined me so that I would have someone to practice with. I still remember the first day of class: we were sitting in an off-white classroom, about 12 of us sitting in a half circle around the chalk board. Our teacher walked in with white hair and little white mustache. He had a very sweet smile. With the assistance of an interpreter he spoke with us that first day. It was my first time watching and paying attention to sign language. The motion of the hands and the facial expressions spoke to me somewhere deep inside. I couldn’t understand the language quite yet but I could feel it. I knew that this was more than just a foreign language requirement for me.

Over the next three years I continued to learn ASL and about Deaf Culture. I was fascinated by both and felt very much a part of it. My junior year I remember going to a party with a bunch of students from my sign language class. One girl there had a hearing loss like I did. We spent the entire party sitting in a corner, talking about hearing loss. It was the first time I was able to talk with someone that knew what I experienced with a hearing loss. I didn’t have to explain anything to her, she just “got it” and could relate to me the way I could relate to her. It was a very powerful experience.

I graduated with a degree in Deaf Studies and started working with deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Along the way I learned that people in the Deaf Community preferred the term “Hard of Hearing” to hearing impaired. The minute I learned this I changed my own language to match. I had never seen myself as impaired. Therefore the Hard of Hearing term matched me perfectly.

My hearing loss has become part of who I am as well as part of my social and professional life. It is not an ailment. I am not the same girl I was at 16 who wanted to have perfect hearing. Besides hearing aids I will not do any surgery on my ears. I may not hear perfectly but my ears are perfect the way they are. I am part of the Deaf Community and have friends with all different kinds of hearing loss to no hearing loss at all. I communicate with my voice and my hands, I listen with my eyes and my ears. Rather than having a “disability” I have a hearing loss then enriches me and my life.

Do not feel sorry for my hearing loss. Without it I would not be in my current job or have my current friends. I probably wouldn’t even have my deaf cat. A disability is not what it prevents a person from doing, it’s what the person can do to use that disability to their advantage. It has taken time but I am happy with my hearing loss, happy with being bilingual, happy to be a part of both the hearing cultures and Deaf Cultures.

The Truth About Hearing Aids

Many people have the misconception that hearing aids correct hearing the same way that glasses correct vision. This is a far, far cry from the truth. In reality hearing aids simply aid the wearer in hearing better. The key word is better.

Since hearing loss is very rarely, if ever, a straight line a hearing aid needs to amplify a high sound differently than it amplifies a low sound. Being a mechanical device it does this with varying degrees of success. The sound itself is mechanical. Though having never had “perfect” hearing I couldn’t quite tell you how different a hearing aid sound is from the actual sound.

To get an idea of how a hearing aid works think of an old VHS tape that is losing its quality. The sound is fading and in order to hear the volume needs to be turned up rather high. The higher the sound goes the more feedback and other noise becomes involved. Eventually you get to a point where understanding is virtually impossible. This is the same as a hearing aid. The worse the hearing loss is the louder the hearing aid needs to be. The louder the hearing aid is the worse the sound quality and understanding ability is decreased.

My right ear is to the point that even with my hearing aid on I don’t have good voice recognition. If someone speaks only to my right ear I will have trouble understanding what is being said. The hearing aid does help me, but it’s helping my left to understand more than it is able to understand itself.

Hearing aids also do not know what sounds I am trying to listen to. I can’t tell my hearing aid to ignore a loud person behind me so that I can hear a soft-spoken person in front of me, it doesn’t have that capability. I always find crowded places difficult. Going to a restaurant with more than one person invariably has me sitting and guessing at the conversation from time to time. There is just too much noise competition.

Likewise I’m not a fan of background music, or a TV on in the room while a conversation takes place. Anything that fights for my ears attention means communication is not going to be easy.

Very few people seem to understand the reality of having hearing aids. Unless people know me well they don’t take into consideration my hearing struggles. It’s not something that is well known. People assume that hearing aids “fix” hearing. All I have is a volume control on a lousy set of speakers.
The next time you interact with someone who has a hearing loss take the time to make sure they can understand. Don’t talk overly loud or slowly, just be aware of your surroundings. More than likely the person you are talking with will appreciate your effort.

The Accident

A year after my surgery I had just started the third grade. This particular day would change the hearing in my right ear forever.

I was running around with friends at recess. For some reason I stopped short and turned my head. Another girl was right behind me and as I turned her nose pushed into my ear. Her nose ended up pushing my hearing aid into my ear and caused it to bleed. My best friend grabbed the recess aide and brought me to the nurses office. The nurse worked on my ear and called my mom to let her know I had an accident but would be ok. My mom called my primary doctor to get my ear checked, just in case.

A little while later the nurse told me my ear had stopped bleeding and sent me back to class. As I was walking down the hall I noticed little red droplets landing by my side: my ear was bleeding again. Since I was a little goody-two-shoes I tilted my head to keep the blood in, went back to class, and asked for permission to go back to the nurses office. Once there my mother was called again and came to school to pick me up.

When she arrived she looked in my ear and saw skin sticking out of my canal. The injury was bad enough to scrap the skin. She cancelled the doctor’s appointment and took me straight to the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary to be evaluated.

For whatever reason they didn’t do a hearing test at this time. I wasn’t allowed to use my hearing aid for a while and probably had some sort of ointment to put in my ear, I honestly don’t remember. A few months after the accident I finally had my hearing tested. At this time they discovered that my hearing had gotten worse.

Throughout my entire childhood these were the terms I knew: better, worse, mild, moderate. I was given no sophisticated language to understand my hearing, I couldn’t tell you what my audiogram meant. When I was 21 I did research and gathered all my hearing tests. It was only then that I realized how much my hearing was affected by this accident.

Following the accident my hearing was tested every 6 months but it essentially stayed the same. I was born with mild/moderate hearing in my right ear, just 10 decibels lower than my left. After the accident I had moderate/profound hearing loss. The ranges that hold most sounds only lowered by a few decibels. However the highest sounds, which my right ear could hear better than my left ear at birth, plummeted to 90 decibels. This number, 90, is the “magic” number that indicates deafness. Those high sounds I could no longer hear. To be honest I am talking about 8,000 hertz, which is probably a noise that only dogs can hear. But there has to be something more to it. To this day my right ear becomes excited at the thought of a high sound. It remembers it, cause it surely is not hearing it!

After the accident my right ear was now a good 20-30 decibels lower than my left ear. Did this make a difference to me? No. I don’t remember noticing my hearing changing. I don’t remember having trouble with my right ear. I don’t remember this affecting me at all, sans more frequent trips to the ENT doctor. I assume that my hearing aid was adjusted to accommodate the decrease in hearing. And I went back to listening with my left ear as I had always done.

The day I finally realized what my hearing was and what my hearing became baffled me. I had no clue the changes that took place, I had no clue it was that severe. To me it is not negative but positive. Without this change I would not understand hearing loss the way I do. The difference between my left ear and my right ear have allowed me, in my adult years, to analyze what I hear and don’t hear. With the hearing I was born with I would not have been able to do this analyzing.

I am convinced that this surgery weakened my ear. I’ve had two incidences in recent years, after I was 21 and researched my hearing. Two blows to the head (due to fainting) that has caused even more hearing loss in my right ear. My left ear continues to stay the same, never faltering. My right ear has now passed the 90 decibel mark and is now down to 110 in the 8,000 hertz range. Now I have a 90 decibel loss in more than just one hertz range.

But don’t feel bad for my right ear, it’s special in it’s own right. I have two earrings in my right ear, poor lefty only has one. When I was 19 I felt my right ear needed something special. I often tease that righty is just for show. Today my voice discrepancy is failing in my right ear. When I first found out about the 110 decibel loss I asked my husband to whisper in my right ear. I heard a tickling popping sound. He was saying testing 1, 2, 3. I’ve learned to no longer listen with my right ear. When I was young I focused on my left ear but knew my right could comprehend as well. Now if a sound is solely geared towards my right ear I usually am not able to follow what is being said.

In righty’s standing defense to all of this, as I type, she has been yelling at me, in her high pitched, numbing, tintinitus way. Yes, dear righty, I know you are special, that is why I am writing about you. But could we please stop the tantrum and put the ringing to rest? Her answer is a higher pitch. If only my 110 decibel loss could help me against the sounds coming from my own head.

Surgery

When I was eight years old I had surgery on my right ear. The most I remember of the planning stages was the doctor asking me if I wanted to only wear one hearing aid after surgery. I got all excited that I wouldn’t have to wear my left hearing aid anymore. However this was not the case. Even though I didn’t fully understand the reason why the hearing aid they were hoping to remove was my right one.

I was born with better hearing in my left ear. This is something I have always known. I listen with my left ear, use the phone with my left ear, and turn my left ear towards a sound I am having trouble hearing. It’s instinctual, natural, a part of me. However it was my right ear that qualified for surgery. To this day the idea of my right ear hearing better is a very strange one for me.

My left ear has primarily nerve damage to it, which to the best of my knowledge is not something that can be operated on. My right ear has primarily bone damage. It was this bone damage, in the middle ear, that the doctor’s hoped to improve my hearing by fixing.

The day of the surgery I remember being in a crowded children’s room, reading a book while I was prepped for surgery. I had to have some medicine put into my rear end that I did not find very enjoyable. When it was time for surgery I wasn’t wheeled down to the room. In exchange I was given a piggy back while I held onto my two stuffed animals that accompanied me on the trip: Chip and Dale. In the operating room I watched my heart rate on the monitor before drifting off to sleep.

The surgery consisted of removing the two smallest bones in the body, the Incus and Malleus, from my head. The Malleus was reshaped and put back in, the Incus I was given in an old eye drop container filled with liquid. This was supposed to help my hearing. In order for my ear to heal properly I had to limit my physical activity for 8 weeks after surgery. Keep in mind that I was eight years old and this was August.

(1=Malleus, 2=Incus)

After the surgery my mother waited for me to wake up in recovery. She saw other people wake up very slowly and groggily. Not me, I woke up and sat straight up with a fast movement, something I wasn’t supposed to do! After being brought to my room for the night I was told that I could eat in an hour if I hadn’t thrown up. An hour passed and my mother left to get the nurse to get me some food. As soon as she left I threw up. My father called the nurses station for assistance.

The next hour passed and I was doing well. My mother left once again to get me some food. Once again I threw up before she could return and my father had to call the nurses station. This continued all afternoon. Finally at nighttime the nurses felt sorry for me and gave me a Popsicle. I remember thoroughly enjoying it.

After one night in the hospital, with my mother by my side and my Chip and Dale dolls’ right ear bandaged up just like mine, I was sent home. When we got home I walked up to the living room, twirled around, and plopped down on the couch. My parents told me I wasn’t supposed to do that! I must have been a real handful for that period as my activity was limited. Once I got back to school I had the physical fitness tests going on. Each class my teacher would ask me if I could do something, for example walk the balance beam. I didn’t know any better and would go across the balance beam. Once home I would ask my mother if I was allowed to do that. She would tell me no. I never told her that I had already done it!

A few weeks after surgery I was so tired of the bandages that I took Chip and Dale’s off.

When we finally went back to the doctor it was discovered that my hearing hadn’t changed much and the surgery was essentially a failure. It didn’t faze me much since my left ear was what I used to hear with. However a year later my hearing would plummet in my right. But that’s a story for another day.

I still have my Incus bone. As a kid I used to bring it into school for show and tell. Eventually the liquid evaporated and I was worried. At the age of 21 I brought it with me to see my ear doctor’s successor, someone who had interned during my surgery. I showed him the bone and said it needed more liquid. He was absolutely shocked that I still had the bone and told me it was now a fossil. For 14 years I would strain into the eye drop bottle to see my bone, not realizing I could take it out. On my way home I stopped by a store and bought a shadow box. Using the Internet I printed out a picture of what the middle ear is supposed to look like. I then glued my Incus to where it was supposed to be and put it in the shadow box. This is a conversation piece in my living room now.

The only thing I am certain that the surgery did for me is tintinitus. I remember thinking that the ringing in my right ear really increased after surgery. While it didn’t do anything for me at the time it did give me a tool to understand hearing loss more. But that is part of the next story.

My Absence

As I mentioned in my previous post my reason for not posting was my very sick kitty, named Callie. Here is a picture of her before she got sick:


She came down with FIP, a deadly cat disease, and died the end of March. It’s been a heartbreaking ordeal. A month ago we adopted again. We found a black and white kitten that we have named Oreo. We picked her up because she was neurotic, or so we were told. She was a stray that had obsessive-compulsive tendencies. When we played with her one on one she circled the room as she played and made us laugh. We knew she would be a good match to our family.

When I went to pick her up I learned one more piece of the puzzle: she is deaf. Instantly her circling began to make sense. She was a stray; she somehow survived out in the wild. She circled to make sure there were no predators in her area; to make sure she was safe. These so called neurotic behaviors were survival instincts.

I brought her home and put her in the second bathroom. While she was not looking I yelled and clapped. I felt funny doing the typical hearing test on a deaf child but needed to know. She didn’t respond at all. In the past month we’ve done numerous tests. She appears to be deaf but has some hearing in her left ear. She tends to circle with that ear out and will tilt her head to allow her left ear to hear. There are no real hearing tests that can be done on a cat so our assessments of her interaction are the best tests we have.

This kitty that was described as “neurotic” is not living up to the label. They called her special, she’s just deaf. She’s now a normal kitty. She still has some of her survival quirks, I’m not sure if those will ever truly leave her. She looks behind her while eating, she circles rooms. She also meows and trills to her little hearts content. She knows what sound is, since she will meow a heart-breaking meow when she can’t find us, and stop and trill happily once we appear. Her purrs are powerful but silent.

She is in the right home. My husband and I have started banging the floor to get her attention. We sign around her and she’s starting to watch us, maybe she’ll pick up a few words. I know she’s just a cat but I feel she should have the same access to communication a hearing cat.

It’s an ironic twist of fate. I know that we needed Callie to introduce us to having a pet. Oreo needed us to provide her with a good and safe home. Welcome home, Oreo. Welcome home.

The best notification system ever and my reason for not posting is my cat, Callie. Since she’s always by my side she’s been a wonder at alerting me to different sounds around the house. She’s alerted me to the phone ringing when I haven’t been able to hear. She’s confirmed that I did hear a loud sound but we are not going to investigate. She especially confirmed that her Daddy, my husband, is home.

Unfortunately my little girl is currently very sick and not giving me much time to pursue other endeavors. If you would like to read more on her I have started a blog to deal with the daily ups and downs of her sickness. I have not abandoned My Imperfect Ears, especially after such a small start, it is just on the back burner. I hope to return soon. Until then you can find me caught up in Callie and her fight to survive.

http://callie-chroniclesofasickcat.blogspot.com/

The Beginning

My hearing loss was diagnosed when I was 5 ½ half. I was in kindergarten and taking my third hearing test. The previous two tests I had managed to pass on my own. The first was in preschool; they gave three students the same test at the same time, facing each other. The other students raised their hands in response to a sound, I raised mine by playing “follow the leader”. The following year my neighbor gave me a one-on-one test. Her hand would move, I would raise mine. To this day, even in those sound proof booths, I can tell when I am being watched for an answer, I need to stare in a dark corner to answer solely based on sound. And having tintinitus doesn’t help.

Back to my kindergarten test: it was the kind school children take with blinders blocking them from their testers. Obviously I did not pass. My school, being the concerned school that they were, sent a measly letter home informing my mother of the results. My mother took action and set up an appointment to have my hearing tested. She also called my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Jamison, to notify her that I may have a hearing loss. Mrs. Jamison thanked my mother and hung up the phone. A little while later she called back and told my mother that she whispered behind my back and I can hear perfectly fine, I was just not listening.

Obviously by the mere fact that I am writing this I do have a hearing loss, and my kindergarten sense of self was poor at best. What followed for me was a series of tests, none of which I remember, and a confirmation that I did have a hearing loss: mild/moderate loss in my left ear, moderate in my right, due to a combination of both nerve and bone damage. There was also an emotional test that discovered that I thought I was a bad little girl. What child wouldn’t, being faced with a teacher like Mrs. Jamison? My best friend would whisper to me in class, softly, quietly, being able to accurately judge the sound of her surroundings. I would whisper back, in what I thought was softly and quietly, and quickly get caught. I was labeled a bad child, a slow child, by the second week of school and there was nothing that could be done to change all of this.

Luckily for me I remember very little of kindergarten. At most I remember looking at a peers paper during a test, trying to figure out what the question was in Jeopardy like fashion. My first hearing aids I do remember. Prior to getting my hearing aids I was asked whether I wanted behind the ear hearing aids, or in the ear hearing aids. I chose behind the ears, since that meant to me there would be nothing in my actual ears themselves. I was quite upset when I was presented with these molds for my ears attached to a mechanical portion that went behind my ears. My personality is a bit of a chameleon, so I accepted them and became accustomed quite rapidly. However I did have issues with a shushing background noise that turned out to be a fan in the other room.

I was told that my hearing aids were not toys and explained how to properly take care of them. I took these words to heart and acted out the role of a perfect childhood geek many times in telling peers that if they got my hearing aids wet they would have to pay for new ones. Though I certainly did test those boundaries myself: no sooner than I got my hearing aids did I go outside to play with my neighbor and run through her sprinklers, forgetting that I had my new hearing aids on. I also remember the time I was sitting in the tub, water filling around me, and quickly taking off my hearing aids and handing them to my mom to put on dryer ground.

In all honesty I don’t feel like anything changed for me upon getting my hearings aids. Obviously it helped me to hear but from one day to the next there was no big difference. The only issue I felt was lack of having a peer. In second grade there was a recess aid who had hearing aids herself. I so wanted to look up to her, to connect, but she was the strict kind of aid and there was nothing for seven year-old me to connect to. In fact, it would take me until the age of 18 to meet other people my age with a hearing loss and really come to terms with my ears as my identity. At this age I was what the doctor’s told me I was: hearing impaired.

Fix Me

We have a “fix me” epidemic in this society. The old saying “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” no longer applies. Instead we are looking for problems to fix, looking for ways to come to perfection. There is a catch; perfection is in the eye of the beholder.

Walk through any gallery and strike up a conversation about any given work of art. Chances are the two people will not agree. Yet we as a society have a so-called “common view” of what perfection is. Perfection is a tall, skinny person, with aesthetic features, good sight, good hearing, good health. No sicknesses or disabilities.

Ignoring the fact that this aesthetic person will be different for each individual, although most will agree with magazine’s “most beautiful” sections, this description is but a small portion of our society. Yet, we all want to fix anything else: obesity, paralysis, blindness, deafness, anything not normal. We want to fix too much.

On the outside, on the aesthetic realm, I am told I meet “perfection.” Humble as I am people say that I am thin and good-looking. I, on the other hand, notice the 20 pounds I’ve put on since college, the cellulite on my thighs, and the old lady’s nose on my face. Still I meet some sort of mold. Until what is not instantly visible is identified. In one ear I have a purple hearing aid mold attached to a clear mechanical shell, on the other I have a small beige in-the-ear hearing aid. I am Hard of Hearing. Not hearing impaired. I have a disability, not a handicap. And unlike the current epidemic I don’t want to be fixed.

Give me hearing aids, I accept those, keep the knives and needles at bay. I am Hard of Hearing, just like I am a woman, just like I am Jewish. It is part of my identity; it is part of who I am. To “fix it” robs me of being me.

There are a lot of surgeries out there to correct hearing. I’ve had one on my right ear. I was eight; I thought I was making my left ear better. The surgery failed and took my right ear from moderate, to profound. Granted, the loss was not overnight, but the surgery did weaken the ear enough to cause future damage. Yet in some ways I am happy I’ve had the surgery. Unlike most people I have one less bone in my body. The incus, the second smallest bone in the body, is sitting in my living room, glued onto a piece of paper mapping where it used to be in my ear. Luckily no one has yet to suggest that I put the bone back in.

It took me many years, but I am happy with who I am. On the inside. On the outside I’d still like to return those 20 pounds back to the refrigerator. Yet people still ask me if I can get surgery to improve my hearing. The key word here is “can”, they assume I want to be fixed. Luckily there is no surgery out there that works for me. The controversial cochlear implant is for someone with far less hearing than me (my left ear, sans it’s hearing aid, is still listening to hum of the air conditioner in the background) and I don’t see ENT doctors frequently enough to have to field off any mentions of surgery.

Don’t get me wrong; some people want to be fixed. And if they want it then they should be fixed. I have a friend who recently got a cochlear implant and is thrilled. I couldn’t be happier for her. What bothers me is a story I saw on the news. I missed most of the story, and the captioning was scrambled, but apparently some family flew to Massachusetts to have their baby implanted. My view is against the implant but I don’t doubt the family their decision and this may very well be the right choice for them. But I can’t help but feel like the spotted eagle. I can’t help but feel like me and my kind are going to be extinct.

Perfection has its drawbacks. If we can’t accept someone in a wheel chair, walking with a cane, talking with their hands, then how are we supposed to accept one another? How are we supposed to move forward as an open-minded society? The more we fix the more problems we will face. Soon we will back to fixing religion and skin color. It’s only a matter of time before the wheel spins full circle.

When people meet me and find out I have hearing loss they feel bad for me. Yet my ears have got me where I am today. My first post-college job was directly related to my hearing loss, and I worked with clients with a hearing loss. That lead me to move into elder services since so many have a hearing loss. I can relate to others with a hearing loss on a one-on-one basis. So don’t feel bad for me. I am proud of my ears, even the left one that just decided to kick into tintinitus at this moment (we’ll duke it out later).
This brings me back to the “fix me” epidemic. Doctors take one look at me and they want to find a cure for my ears. We are so concentrated on fixing things to our own vision of perfection that we don’t take the time to pause, step back, and see what that person wants. Maybe the lady in the corner with the big nose likes her nose? Maybe the gentleman in the wheelchair is proud of his accomplishments? Maybe the obese woman enjoys being cuddly? And maybe this author enjoys the fact that her ears are less than perfect? Maybe we all need to find out own realm of “less then perfect”. I can assure you that it is a lot better than mere perfection itself.