Ramblings

When I was a student, I couldn’t understand how other boys were able to chat up girls in discos. Besides wondering how they knew what to say, it puzzled me how they could hear the girls over the din. I would always have to ask them – perhaps twice – to repeat themselves. It wasn’t a great start to a relationship. I already knew I would need a hearing aid one day.

My grandfather was very deaf from when first I knew him. He always wore a waistcoat, even in summer, to house the bulky battery which went with his hearing aid, and to be understood you had to talk loudly, clearly and directly at him. It was a source of some frustration to my mother that he seemed to understand her sister-in-law more readily than he understood her.

As children, my brother and I used to tease our Dad because he couldn’t hear grasshoppers. He grew deaf in old age, and was deeply troubled by his difficulty in keeping up with conversations, particularly in large and noisy family gatherings. He expressed his frustration in this poem:

The Devil came up to my side.
“Can I help you, sir?” he said.
“Restore my hearing” I replied,
“My soul is yours when I am dead”.

The occasions when I struggled grew more frequent, but two in particular last year nudged me towards taking action. I had chosen an extremely noisy restaurant in which to have a steak frites lunch with a former work colleague. He was soft spoken, and after he had repeated himself twice I couldn’t ask him again, and I would make a noncommittal grunt of acknowledgment. The conversation didn’t exactly sparkle. The second occasion was in a busy pub after a gig in Clapham by my daughter’s band. I was having a drink with my wife and our two daughters. The banter was flowing freely, but I missed about half of it: I was completely off the pace, and could make no more than an occasional contribution.

Soon after, I was chiding my daughter (she might say nagging) for not having registered to vote at her new address, and she hit back with a nag of her own. When would I do something about my hearing? She was right, of course. How much of the rest of my life would I spend allowing my vanity to ruin my conversations with loved ones, when help might be at hand?

Undeniably there’s a stigma attached to hearing aids. You see plenty of young people and children wearing spectacles, but hearing aids are strongly linked to old age. And there is a tendency – and I confess that I’ve been guilty of this – to dismiss an older person as less relevant once this age signifier is spotted.

So it wasn’t an easy decision to finally take action, but happily a private hearing clinic had opened locally – presumably judging that a village with a largely ageing and prosperous population would be an auspicious site for them. Two other things encouraged me to make an appointment. My older brother had started wearing an aid, which removed any competitive misgivings I might have felt had I been the first. Secondly a number of lively, active friends from the local u3a – not all older than me – wore hearing aids, which didn’t seem to prevent them from having plenty of fun.

So I made the appointment and was soon sitting chatting to the young woman assigned as my specialist. I soon realised she was speaking from personal experience, having had a hearing loss since childhood.

Hearing her first hand experience of deafness and how she dealt with it made her advice all the more persuasive, and its coming from a person who was by no means old and grey certainly removed some of the stigma. The cynical thought flashed through my mind that her deafness was a tactical sales ploy, but that was unworthy. She was obviously a pleasant and straightforward person, and I banished the thought.

I was asked to listen on headphones to a series of beeps of varying pitch and volume, and press a button each time I heard a sound. She then showed me a graph plotting volume on one axis and pitch on the other, demonstrating how my hearing dropped away at higher frequencies. As this was my first hearing test there was no base for comparison, so it didn’t quantify hearing loss, but it showed my left ear worse than my right.

The specialist said my hearing wasn’t too bad – fairly typical for my age – but that they could fit me with an aid which would improve it. Would I like to think about it for a week or two? I didn’t need to. I had already got over the biggest hurdles – admitting I had a problem and making the appointment. Not to mention being reconciled to the substantial cost. Having gone so far, it would be perverse to stop now.

I returned soon after for a fitting, one aid for each ear. I had imagined that I might wear them only on the occasions when I really needed them. For most days and activities my hearing was adequate: at home, watching TV, theatre and opera. The problem was confined to noisy social gatherings, pubs and restaurants. But I was told I should wear them all the time: although sound travels through the ear, it is processed in the brain. And the best way to help the brain adjust is to wear them all the time apart from in bed or when taking a shower.

I don’t have to start wearing a waistcoat, they are very compact. I don’t have to fiddle with tiny batteries, as the aids recharge in their case overnight. That’s a boon: I remember Dad struggling to change fiddly little batteries when his eyesight was fading and his fingers had lost sensitivity. And they can be adjusted to different volume settings, or for different environments using Bluetooth on a phone app – so instead of being the old man fiddling with my hearing aid, I’m just another person looking at my phone.

I soon noticed was that they didn’t amplify only the sounds I wanted to hear. I hadn’t missed the swishing of my trousers. Emptying the dishwasher was a noisy business. Sneezes were, well, deafening. And as I had been warned, a flushing toilet now sounded like the Niagara Falls.

But the Christmas party season was just beginning, and that gave me the chance to put them through their paces. I wore them at every opportunity, to ‘out’ myself as a hearing aid wearer – and if anyone wanted to make a comment they could get it over with. In fact it was more common for people to ask how it was going, and confide that they might themselves need to take a similar step soon – much as I had been discreetly seeking advice from other wearers in the previous months.

Did they help? Yes, but it felt incremental, not transformational. That was partly because they’re put on a low setting for an initial period to allow your brain to adjust to a new process. But more recently, with the aids now fully on, I was having Sunday lunch in a pub, and used the ‘restaurant’ setting. This employs directional microphones, which amplifies sound in front of you but not behind. When I switched this setting on, the background noise fell away sharply, and it was much easier to hear the conversation at my table. Progress.

Nevertheless, when asked at a follow-up appointment how it was going, I confessed to a slight feeling of disappointment. When I had been fitted for spectacles, the new prescription enabled me to read the smallest writing – it was a complete solution to my eyesight problem. But as the specialist pointed out, the hearing aids are just that, aids – not a solution. And they certainly help. But we must hope that in the decades to come, science will nudge us ever closer to human hearing perfection.