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.
Notes From The Cactus Patch 