You know how sometimes weird things happen? And how one thing leads to another and another then you find yourself somewhere that you never anticipated, and its not necessarily a bad thing but mostly a good thing and then suddenly things are just different than they were before?
This summer has been a whirlwind. We took the kids out of school early, left Virginia, left the Navy, moved back home to Houston in June where its hotter than Hades, transitioned to a new house, new neighborhood, new everything, spent the summer with LOTS of quality time together inside because of that thing I said about Hades earlier, and oh yeah, I got hearing aids. I know, right? Hearing aids. I'm a very barely 35 year old.
(I'm just trying to keep you interested with pictures...)
About three and a half months ago I saw an audiologist. For the last 9 months or so I have been having a problem with my throat. I have seen just about every kind of doctor and explored every avenue of possibility to figure this thing out but to no avail. As a final push effort, knowing that I was about to move and change not only doctors but insurance companies as well, my doctor sent me to an audiologist to check out the whole throat/ear connection. In hindsight, this is no small detail - that I had noticed a change in my hearing since Jonah was born. I didn't really think anything of it. I certainly would never have thought "I need to go have my hearing tested". I had simply noticed a couple of annoyances that weren't there before. The house and my kids seemed unusually loud and overwhelming. Feeling irritated and overwhelmed by too much noise seems the opposite of hard of hearing. Dinnertime was downright overload for me but I figured anyone with five small kids would think so. I couldn't multitask with noises-I am constantly asking my poor family to turn music down or off because I just can't hear things over it, no matter how loud or soft. I experienced a frequent ringing in my ears that I figured was somewhat normal. I was having a hard time understanding the kids, especially the younger ones and found myself asking them to repeat themselves, often. I would have to bend down and make sure they were looking right at me to even get what they were saying. But again, Hazel is only 5 and has a little bit of a speech thing anyway. I assumed it was normal. I couldn't understand anything yelled at me through the house. Social situations, while I enjoyed being with friends, was frustrating and tiring. And the weirdest one, I wasn't hearing the baby cry at night. At the time, I wrote all of them off as pretty normal stuff.
I went to see the audiologist. She did a slew of tests and found that the openings and passageways between everything in my throat and ears was normal. But she sat me down at the end with a serious look on her face and told me that I had a moderate hearing loss in both ears. It was permanent. And it was not going to get better. Those last two things, she felt a need to repeat several times. I don't know if I wasn't acting surprised enough but in any case I didn't really know what to say. I left the appointment and called Clark who had just left that very day to move down to Houston and start his new job where we wouldn't be joining him for an entire month. I was anxious and upset and I cried. I didn't know what I wanted to do or what I was supposed to do. The audiologist had told me that if I were a child in school she would insist on hearing aids, immediately.
I pushed it all aside. We were moving and there was just too much going on. Plus I just needed time to process what exactly it meant and what my options were. A couple of weeks later I saw a second audiologist. I had a few questions. I very hesitantly tried on some hearing aids and something weird happened.
She put one on one ear. Then she walked around me to do the other side.
I heard her walk around me.
Forget the things that I had actually noticed about a change in my hearing up until then. I didn't realize that before that, there were things I wasn't hearing at all. The experience was eye opening. But I left that appointment still feeling frustrated and unsure of what I wanted to do.
I called my parents and asked about our family history. I was aware that my grandmother had worn hearing aids for a long time but had always assumed it was caused by a bout of scarlet fever that she had as a child. While that was true, I was unaware (as I think most of the family was) that her hearing loss was more severe and had existed much longer than we had known. In addition to that, I found out that she had a brother that was born deaf, and he has a deaf daughter as well.
There are only three things that can cause a hearing loss like mine in someone my age: a severe illness, a rare side effect to medication, genetics.
So I shelved the issue a while longer. The move was in full swing and I just couldn't see more doctors and have more appointments before leaving Virginia.
Fast forward a couple of months. We are feeling somewhat settled in Houston. Our new insurance is up and running. I am noticing more and more, the effects that this hearing loss has on my life. I have been frustrated and tired for a long time. While driving in the car by myself a few weeks ago I came to a startling realization. This hearing loss was having a negative impact on my life and on the relationships with my family. Never before had I attributed any of this obscure frustration or exhaustion to the fact that I was not hearing people, I felt irritated and annoyed that I couldn't hear or understand and that I was spending day after day expending loads of energy just to be a part of conversations and stay attune to the details of our home. Big get togethers with friends or going anywhere noisy and loud was especially exhausting. I just didn't realize.
So I began searching for my answer. I knew what the answer was. It was more that I was searching for comfort and assurance that it was going to be OK. It took much prayer and pondering to understand it, and come to terms with the fact that I needed to move forward with the hearing aids.
I didn't want to.
I really really didn't want to.
I didn't want a dependency like that.
I didn't want the stigma that comes with wearing them.
I wanted to be whole without the help of something, anything.
And when I found out how much they cost I really didn't want them.
I recognized that this was not just like getting glasses. I couldn't simply decide that I didn't want to wear them one day and then wear them again the next. If I was going to do it, it required a commitment. In order to restore a semblance of "natural sound" I was going to have to wear them religiously to give my brain a chance to reprogram itself to hear and process sound the way it is supposed to. The idea is not to just wear something that amplifies sound but it actually gets your brain to reprocess how it hears and naturally makes its own adjustments to temper sound, block out background noise and clarify what you are focusing on.
So I made an appointment with an audiologist in Houston. They tested my hearing again and got the same results as before. I made the decision and commited to wear hearing aids, at 35 years old.
During one conversation at her office I asked, for the sake of making conversation easier when explaining why out of the blue it would seem, I was suddenly wearing hearing aids, if she could quantify the loss for me. It's not really measured by percentage since there is much more detail that goes into it: frequencies, pitch, etc. But she did the best she could. I am somewhere around a 40% loss in both ears, the right being slightly worse.
I was interested to find out that people with an existing hearing loss are also more susceptible to environmental damage/loss. I learned that getting hearing aids would help slow down the progression of loss over time.
When I tried the aids on for the first time after making that decision, it was hard to take them off. They had to be ordered and calibrated to fit my specific needs but I liked what I heard when I had them on.
The first time I put on my own I reached into my purse to get something and remarked to the audiologist that I felt kind of like a super hero, a bionic woman that had supersonic hearing. I mean, I heard the rustling of fabric in my purse, the crinkle of bandaid wrappers and the keys clinking around. She smiled at me and replied "Oh honey, I heard that too. Everyone hears things like that." I suddenly felt very sorry for the fact that I have been short changing myself and just "making do".
I justified not getting them because I am not deaf. I can hear. I can most definitely get by. But I was missing a clarity that I had no idea I was missing.
It has taken several weeks to get used to even wearing them. It has taken lots of trial and error to find the right fit with lots of trips to the audiologist. I'm still not completely there but I have come to terms with the dependency and gratitude I have for them. The more days that go by wearing them, the more stark the difference is when I take them off at night to go to bed. I take them off and my surroundings instantly become dull and muffled. In the morning I usually get up and do a few things. It's fine. I can hear. And then I get to putting them on and suddenly I can hear the kids up in their room and what it going on throughout the entire house.
It's incredible.
Occasionally there is a day here or there that I need to remind myself of this, but they are a blessing. The entire sequence of events that led to them was a blessing as were people that have come into my life and along my path over the course of the last year that made it less weird and lessened the discomfort of the transition.
So if at any time during the last year I have looked at your blankly and nodded my head, or answered in a way that was totally irrelevant to what you were saying, I apologize. That's just one thing that's been happening in our neck of the woods. Stay tuned for more exciting posts about birthdays, kids in school, and mothers reconnecting with their babies in a quiet house.
This summer has been a whirlwind. We took the kids out of school early, left Virginia, left the Navy, moved back home to Houston in June where its hotter than Hades, transitioned to a new house, new neighborhood, new everything, spent the summer with LOTS of quality time together inside because of that thing I said about Hades earlier, and oh yeah, I got hearing aids. I know, right? Hearing aids. I'm a very barely 35 year old.
About three and a half months ago I saw an audiologist. For the last 9 months or so I have been having a problem with my throat. I have seen just about every kind of doctor and explored every avenue of possibility to figure this thing out but to no avail. As a final push effort, knowing that I was about to move and change not only doctors but insurance companies as well, my doctor sent me to an audiologist to check out the whole throat/ear connection. In hindsight, this is no small detail - that I had noticed a change in my hearing since Jonah was born. I didn't really think anything of it. I certainly would never have thought "I need to go have my hearing tested". I had simply noticed a couple of annoyances that weren't there before. The house and my kids seemed unusually loud and overwhelming. Feeling irritated and overwhelmed by too much noise seems the opposite of hard of hearing. Dinnertime was downright overload for me but I figured anyone with five small kids would think so. I couldn't multitask with noises-I am constantly asking my poor family to turn music down or off because I just can't hear things over it, no matter how loud or soft. I experienced a frequent ringing in my ears that I figured was somewhat normal. I was having a hard time understanding the kids, especially the younger ones and found myself asking them to repeat themselves, often. I would have to bend down and make sure they were looking right at me to even get what they were saying. But again, Hazel is only 5 and has a little bit of a speech thing anyway. I assumed it was normal. I couldn't understand anything yelled at me through the house. Social situations, while I enjoyed being with friends, was frustrating and tiring. And the weirdest one, I wasn't hearing the baby cry at night. At the time, I wrote all of them off as pretty normal stuff.
I went to see the audiologist. She did a slew of tests and found that the openings and passageways between everything in my throat and ears was normal. But she sat me down at the end with a serious look on her face and told me that I had a moderate hearing loss in both ears. It was permanent. And it was not going to get better. Those last two things, she felt a need to repeat several times. I don't know if I wasn't acting surprised enough but in any case I didn't really know what to say. I left the appointment and called Clark who had just left that very day to move down to Houston and start his new job where we wouldn't be joining him for an entire month. I was anxious and upset and I cried. I didn't know what I wanted to do or what I was supposed to do. The audiologist had told me that if I were a child in school she would insist on hearing aids, immediately.
I pushed it all aside. We were moving and there was just too much going on. Plus I just needed time to process what exactly it meant and what my options were. A couple of weeks later I saw a second audiologist. I had a few questions. I very hesitantly tried on some hearing aids and something weird happened.
She put one on one ear. Then she walked around me to do the other side.
I heard her walk around me.
Forget the things that I had actually noticed about a change in my hearing up until then. I didn't realize that before that, there were things I wasn't hearing at all. The experience was eye opening. But I left that appointment still feeling frustrated and unsure of what I wanted to do.
I called my parents and asked about our family history. I was aware that my grandmother had worn hearing aids for a long time but had always assumed it was caused by a bout of scarlet fever that she had as a child. While that was true, I was unaware (as I think most of the family was) that her hearing loss was more severe and had existed much longer than we had known. In addition to that, I found out that she had a brother that was born deaf, and he has a deaf daughter as well.
There are only three things that can cause a hearing loss like mine in someone my age: a severe illness, a rare side effect to medication, genetics.
So I shelved the issue a while longer. The move was in full swing and I just couldn't see more doctors and have more appointments before leaving Virginia.
Fast forward a couple of months. We are feeling somewhat settled in Houston. Our new insurance is up and running. I am noticing more and more, the effects that this hearing loss has on my life. I have been frustrated and tired for a long time. While driving in the car by myself a few weeks ago I came to a startling realization. This hearing loss was having a negative impact on my life and on the relationships with my family. Never before had I attributed any of this obscure frustration or exhaustion to the fact that I was not hearing people, I felt irritated and annoyed that I couldn't hear or understand and that I was spending day after day expending loads of energy just to be a part of conversations and stay attune to the details of our home. Big get togethers with friends or going anywhere noisy and loud was especially exhausting. I just didn't realize.
So I began searching for my answer. I knew what the answer was. It was more that I was searching for comfort and assurance that it was going to be OK. It took much prayer and pondering to understand it, and come to terms with the fact that I needed to move forward with the hearing aids.
I didn't want to.
I really really didn't want to.
I didn't want a dependency like that.
I didn't want the stigma that comes with wearing them.
I wanted to be whole without the help of something, anything.
And when I found out how much they cost I really didn't want them.
I recognized that this was not just like getting glasses. I couldn't simply decide that I didn't want to wear them one day and then wear them again the next. If I was going to do it, it required a commitment. In order to restore a semblance of "natural sound" I was going to have to wear them religiously to give my brain a chance to reprogram itself to hear and process sound the way it is supposed to. The idea is not to just wear something that amplifies sound but it actually gets your brain to reprocess how it hears and naturally makes its own adjustments to temper sound, block out background noise and clarify what you are focusing on.
So I made an appointment with an audiologist in Houston. They tested my hearing again and got the same results as before. I made the decision and commited to wear hearing aids, at 35 years old.
During one conversation at her office I asked, for the sake of making conversation easier when explaining why out of the blue it would seem, I was suddenly wearing hearing aids, if she could quantify the loss for me. It's not really measured by percentage since there is much more detail that goes into it: frequencies, pitch, etc. But she did the best she could. I am somewhere around a 40% loss in both ears, the right being slightly worse.
I was interested to find out that people with an existing hearing loss are also more susceptible to environmental damage/loss. I learned that getting hearing aids would help slow down the progression of loss over time.
When I tried the aids on for the first time after making that decision, it was hard to take them off. They had to be ordered and calibrated to fit my specific needs but I liked what I heard when I had them on.
The first time I put on my own I reached into my purse to get something and remarked to the audiologist that I felt kind of like a super hero, a bionic woman that had supersonic hearing. I mean, I heard the rustling of fabric in my purse, the crinkle of bandaid wrappers and the keys clinking around. She smiled at me and replied "Oh honey, I heard that too. Everyone hears things like that." I suddenly felt very sorry for the fact that I have been short changing myself and just "making do".
I justified not getting them because I am not deaf. I can hear. I can most definitely get by. But I was missing a clarity that I had no idea I was missing.
It's incredible.
Occasionally there is a day here or there that I need to remind myself of this, but they are a blessing. The entire sequence of events that led to them was a blessing as were people that have come into my life and along my path over the course of the last year that made it less weird and lessened the discomfort of the transition.
So if at any time during the last year I have looked at your blankly and nodded my head, or answered in a way that was totally irrelevant to what you were saying, I apologize. That's just one thing that's been happening in our neck of the woods. Stay tuned for more exciting posts about birthdays, kids in school, and mothers reconnecting with their babies in a quiet house.
