Posted on by Phil Strawn

Speak A Little Louder, I Can’t Hear You


Old man finishing off what hearing he has left…

I visited my Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor today. He wasn’t in the office, so I saw his PA. She escorted me to an exam room, and two techs checked my old ears for wax buildup and performed several tests by blowing air and a vacuum in both ears. Then, the PA took a microscopic robot thingy and stuck the device in both ears. When someone says, ” Hmm, oh my,” that gets my attention. Medical people have their own language. I should know; Momo is one of them. They use big words and have a secret handshake. She knew the gal from her hospital days; they hugged and did the handshake, then said some big words about my condition. When they got around to the hearing test, I was a nervous wreck.

The hearing test was easy: sit in a sound booth with headphones and a little button to push when you hear a beep. I sat there for a while in silence. Finally, I asked the tech when the test started. She said it started ten minutes ago. I failed miserably; I can’t hear jack shit, deaf as a cave-dwelling Salamander.

The PA showed me the results. She and Momo used some bigger words to describe my condition. Almost deaf in the left ear and coming up fast in the right one, my good ear.

” Doc, isn’t there anything you can do, like a transplant or a microchip or something?” She did that hmm thing again and told me to start learning sign language, stat. Crap, I’m going to be like Helen Keller, deaf and mute; it all goes hand in hand. First, the ears go, then the speech, then I’ll go blind and stagger around the family Christmas dinner, grabbing fist fulls of food off my relative’s plates. And to top it off, the PA says folks with severe hearing loss always get Dementia. So I’ll be deaf, blind, and mute, sitting in a chair with a drool sponge under my chin, and Momo will have to pull me around in a Western Flyer wagon. There has to be a better way to checkout.

I didn’t know that back in the day, standing in front of a Fender Duel Showman amp playing rock music at incredible decibels would destroy my hearing? Hell, I was sixteen and heard everything just fine. Alice Cooper once said that rock music will get you, one way or the other. It took a while, and I didn’t learn my lesson; I spent another twenty years doing the same thing in the 2000s. By the end of my tenure in the American Classics rock band, all of us were almost deaf.

The good news is that these new hearing aids have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. I can talk on my iPhone hands-free, check my voice and email, listen to my stereo, tune into Police radio, listen to air traffic control, hack other folks’ hearing aids, and listen in on their conversations. It also checks my vital signs and brain function and sends reports back to my doctor, and I can still play music with my church praise band. Who knew going deaf could be so interesting.

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15 Replies to “Speak A Little Louder, I Can’t Hear You”

  1. Did you know that Mark Antony was responsible for robbing the populace of its hearing? “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” And, of course, he didn’t give them their ears back. That was deaf-initely an outrageous act on his part, and a very sad day in history, although you won’t hear any historians talking about it.

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    1. Keep an ear to the ground, that’s how the Indians knew who was coming. If Tonto was deaf, how did the Lone Ranger know who was sneaking up on them. I hear ya, well at least a little.

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  2. Very funny. Sort of. Well, just to make you feel worse, this is all happening to my husband. He’s a couple years younger than you maybe. Problem is do you really want EMF wireless stuff going back and forth in your brain if you’re at risk for dementia? Is what I tell him. The other bad news is he’s talking on the phone and I think he’s talking to me and when he wants me to talk to someone he can’t unhook them easily. SO since he could never hear me at ALL before, NOW he hears me less because he’s listening to a phone or music or some other shit on there…. It’s great. LOL

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    1. Yeah, not sure about the cloud waves in the brain. The left ear is kaput, so all the focus will be on my right. Now, hearing about your husbands experience, I will be curious about the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Tell him to hang in there.

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      1. Well, it depends how much you want to hear Momo. LOL. It may work out fine for you, maybe not so much for her– if you are talking on the phone or listening to music. 🙂 You won’t hear her at all.

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  3. I can relate. It was not loud music (I have no musical talent), but a tumor in the right ear, and my early work experience with jackhammers that caused me to tap the earphones in the sound booth asking, “Is this thing on?” The Bluetooth hearing aid ( only one ‘cause the right ear is dead) is a wonder though. I’ll only take calls on my cellphone and I have a TV thingy that pumps the sound directly into my brain. Still, the most used word in my vocabulary is, “What?”
    I hear you brother (or not).

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  4. I’m sorry to learn about your hearing loss, Phil. With your rock music history, it’s not surprising. My brother-in-law got a cochlear implant and he’s very happy with his ability to hear now. Good luck and thanks for the chuckles. 🙂

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  5. Hey, Phil! Now I got to get my hands on one of those beauties! I’ll be calling my ENT come Monday morning …. right before I get two teeth extracted, two crowns, 3 implants and my old front top bridge replaced with a temporary. Then, after 6 months and $33K which will pay for my dentist’s two daughter’s weddings, I’ll have a lovely new grill.

    About 20 years ago, I had a tiny but uncomfortable wart removed from the crease in my arm at the elbow joint. Every couple of minutes the doctor would say “Well, look at that!” Look at what? WTF are you looking at, man? I never did find out what he was looking at but a few years later when my husband went to the same doctor for a suspicious but benign growth on his head, he said the doctor kept repeating the same thing to him! Well, look at that!

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    1. Momo says all the doctors she knows took lessons on how to speak that way and make their patients uncomfortable. Hmmm. Sort of un-nerving. I got a mole on my forehead that Momo keeps staring at, kind of a third eye thing, but she thinks it might be the big C, again. Ima going to cut it off with a steak knife and put it in a jar of rubbing alcohol. We don’t need no stinking medical degree.

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      1. An ice cube and your handy dandy Swiss Army Knife will do the trick nicely. I’m a pro at removing Bill’s skin tags on his neck. Yeah, it’s true love when you trust your spouse with pressing sharp implements against your neck.

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  8. Hopefully the progress of it goes slow… I see a hearing aid in my future This getting older sucks Phil. Like Casey Stengal said: “The trick is growing up without growing old.”

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