I Can Hear You, If I Want to and You Want Me to

"When was the last time you had your ears thoroughly cleaned?" an Air Force medical technician huffed at me as he ripped open the soundproof booth to make sure my headphones were on right. I'm sure I said I didn't know. But I did know: never in my seventeen years. That wasn't the problem, however. My ears weren't dirty or plugged. I had a hearing loss, and somebody was telling me for the first time.

A few weeks later I was called back to Eglin Air Force Base for a re-evaluation, since an ROTC scholarship to college hinged on the results. I failed again. I received a medical rejection form soon thereafter, informing me that my application was denied because of "substandard auditory acuity." I've never forgotten the phrase. Nor have I forgotten the bitterness I felt at the destruction of my carefully constructed dream of free college, free law school, and a career in the navy or army. I planned to save the rejection letter so that in the moment of my future inevitable triumph I could shove it in the faces of those who had blocked me. I have no idea what happened to it now. Nor do I know how I planned to find the bureaucrat who had mailed me that letter in order to demonstrate his stupidity to him years later. As things have evolved, if I could find him now I'd thank him and offer to buy him a beer.

The hearing loss was asymptomatic until my late 20s. One physician recommended I go on a low-fat high-fiber diet to keep the blood vessels in my ears from getting clogged. That lasted about four hours. I tried a hearing aid in one ear when I was 29, but it didn't help very much when compared to the cost and trouble of adapting. It was just as well, because aids were analog in those days. By the time I went back at age 35 to get two hearing aids, digital ones were common. Mine have mostly done the job, but as two first-rate local audiologists told me, even with aids I was never going to hear normally again. It's a moderate loss. It's not minor, nor is it profound. I don't know where it's headed, or whether it has stabilized or might yet do so. I don't think about it, to be honest.

Frequently people ask me (and I don't mind) how the hearing loss happened. As far as I know, there are only two ways, the same as with bad eyes. You either inherit it, or something like a disease or accident happens. In my case, it was probably inherited, although I can remember firing some shotguns as a teenager and having my hearing temporarily numbed. The unusual thing for me is the frequency range of my loss: it's in the middle pitches, whereas most people who begin to lose their hearing do so at the higher frequencies. I can hear the bass from your stereo very well, and I can interpret squeaks. But the alto and tenor ranges are diabolical.

My life with hearing loss has reached the point where I wonder if I would even accept a miracle cure for this supposed problem. When I want more peace, all I have to do is remove my hearing aids. Or, as I often do on airplanes, I can turn them off and have a kind of half plug in each ear. I probably sleep much better than I would if I had standard hearing. I don't absolutely need to have normal hearing again because I can function well enough with the aids, although my desire to have closed captions on TV or to use DVD subtitles has been known to irritate some in the perfect-hearing community who find reading their movies to be too much work. I've also found myself to be a good resource for many who have an age-related hearing loss but can't accept the idea of wearing hearing aids. Their spouses (since it's almost always men who resist, let's be honest and say it's their wives) often ask me to promote the devices in the name of renewed domestic harmony.

One of the most interesting things about hearing loss and sociability is how it can lead you to tune out of conversations you actually could follow if you tried harder. There's enough redundancy in spoken words to follow most conversations and get the gist, but when society expects you to follow every last syllable and you can't, you get used to just nodding and smiling and giving up. The habit becomes self-reinforcing if you're not very careful. That's why we're sometimes rightfully accused of selective hearing loss by those closest to us. They're right, but not in the way they think. We didn't listen and then pretend not to hear; we didn't even try to hear in the first place because we didn't think we could do it well enough. It reminds me of my days in a dorm in Germany when I was 20. All the students spoke Swabian, a very tough South German dialect. I learned how to be present but not all there even before I needed to because of my poor hearing.

There's still a stigma attached to hearing aids that goes beyond that associated with glasses. Glasses, I must add, have become cool over the last ten or fifteen years, but they were deadly for one's self-esteem when I was growing up. The loss of hearing is often regarded either as a sign of age or developmental impairment. I first worried about having visible hearing aids not because I was concerned about being regarded as old, but as handicapped: as if I had been hearing impaired since childhood and therefore deprived of regular classrooms, a full range of social contacts, etc. In fact, I was projecting my own sorry snap judgments about hearing loss onto others. I got over all that. Anyway, there's nothing more risible than someone who can't hear just because he won't wear hearing aids. That's where I was quickly headed when I was persuaded the time had come to be fitted for aids.

So, yes, I can hear you if I want to. Every now and then you may be asked to repeat yourself, but we'll get there if you really want me to listen to you.