What? Huh?
Kate Stone Lombardi
Word Count 772
I’m sitting in a soundproof booth, high quality headphones clamped over my ears, hearing absolutely nothing.
“Clever,” I thought. “They’re weaving in gaps of silence, so you can’t cheat.”
This hearing test required raising your hand each time you heard a chime, which varied in pitch and volume. I figured the evaluation included sections of utter quiet, thereby bagging patients who claimed to hear each tone.
It turned out, though, that those empty interludes weren’t an attempt to catch cheaters. I simply couldn’t hear a large range of the sounds.
I’d only made this appointment with this audiologist to humor my husband, Michael.
Years earlier, I’d insisted he have his hearing checked, peppering him with articles that documented the connection between hearing loss and cognitive decline, social isolation and depression.
Among my many faults is a near-insufferable self-righteousness. In addition to hounding Michael, I criticized friends who refused to get their hearing tested. Because of their obstinance, I complained, they were impossible to converse with in restaurants or at dinner parties. On top of that, I had unkind words for people who finally got hearing aids and refused to wear them, grousing that they weren’t comfortable.
Finally – and probably so that I would just shut up about it already - Michael agreed to get his hearing checked.
The first doctor asked if he had trouble hearing anyone but his wife. Michael told him that mine was the only voice he couldn’t make out. The doctor dismissed it as a case of “husband ear.” Diagnosis: he simply wasn’t listening. It happened, understandably, to all men who’d been married for decades. Wink, wink, nod, nod.
This annoyed me on multiple levels. Had Michael just been tuning me out? But wait - this guy hadn’t even put my husband in a booth to formally test his hearing. Later I learned that the doctor had given the same spiel to many men in my community.
After another few months of constant “What?”s and “Huh?”s, I insisted he see a different audiologist, preferably a woman. He returned sporting a pair of extremely expensive and somewhat temperamental hearing aids.
So about two years later, when Michael told me I needed to have my hearing checked, I wasn’t in any position to balk. Fine, I thought, I’d practice what I preached.
After I exited the testing booth, I sat down with the audiologist who showed me a graph. It depicted a horizontal line holding steady for a short while and then making a precipitous dive, like the stock market plummeting during a recession. It didn’t require a statistician to get the gist of my results. After a certain frequency, my hearing loss was obvious.
My hearing aids are now sitting in their little charger; red one on the right, blue on the left. Sometimes they stay in their case for days on end.
I hate them.
It’s not that they don’t work. They do. In fact, when I wear them, I can hear my hair. The individual strands sound dry as they pass over my ear, making me wonder if I need to use more conditioner. Everything is louder and clearer. Sentences no longer seem to drop off at the end.
I’ll admit that I’ve always been fond of my ears. They’re kind of cute, because a) my lobes are tapered instead of hanging down in a simian way, and b) my ears are flat against the side of my head, not protruding at all.
My issue is not vanity, though. You really can’t see the hearing aids when I wear them– it’s just a tiny silver wire that wraps around my temple and into the ear. It perfectly matches those noisy strands of silver in my hair.
The problem is that they are uncomfortable. The longer I wear them, the more they hurt. They’re wedged behind those flat ears and push them out. My glasses press down on them, making the hearing aids heavier and further bending my ears into a near elf-like position.
What was I saying about people who whine about these devices again?
Last week we were in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. I wasn’t wearing my hearing aids, using one of my many excuses for not having them in. Geez, they are so expensive – I’d hate to lose one while hiking.
The forest was stunning, like a cathedral - completely still, with dappled sunlight playing in the canopy of leaves above.
I turned to Michael and said, “I love the silence.”
He agreed. “All you can hear are the sound of our footsteps, the birds and the wind rustling the trees.”
Huh? Whatever.
Kate is a journalist, author and essayist. For 20 years, she was a regular contributor to The New York Times. Kate’s work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Time.com, Good Housekeeping, Readers Digest, AARP’s “The Ethel” and other national publications. She is the author of “THE MAMA’S BOY MYTH” (Avery/Penguin, 2012), a nonfiction book on raising boys.