Now I can hear what you hear... I think

Hearing aids open up a world I had no idea I was missing

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The last time I wrote to you about experiencing the beginnings of hearing loss, I was still in a little bit of denial.

Yes, I’d been open about it and yes, I had admitted to myself that my hearing was problematic — enough that I’d visited an audiologist to take a hearing test. But there was still a part of me that thought it would all just go away.

That I’d wake up the next day, go about my routine, and life would go on as normal. That the audiologist wouldn’t have anything actionable for me, and that I could safely ignore my hearing for years to come.

And then I went to the audiologist’s office.

When I walked inside, she guided me down a narrow hallway to her small, spare office, where all the hearing testing equipment I’d been hooked up to weeks earlier was. In her hands were a pair of tiny, almond-shaped electronic devices, barely visible in her palm.

“Want to try these on?”

I said okay, putting first one and then the other in my ears. It felt strange prodding a foreign object into my ear canal, but once it was inside, I relaxed almost instantly — I could barely feel it there.

“Okay, I’m going to turn them on now,” she said. What she needed to do was download an app for my phone, which would then connect to the hearing aids via Bluetooth. So I could adjust their volume up or down later, and a record could be kept of the settings I liked best.

“Okay,” I replied. “Ready when you are.”

Then, she turned them on and… I’m not sure I was really ready for what I heard. Because what I heard, what instantly became apparent, was what I wasn’t hearing before, what I hadn’t been hearing for a long, long time.

“It’s really different, isn’t it?” she said, clearly seeing the surprise on my face. I felt my jaw fall open at all the sound that was coming at me from all around the room.

“Now, the world is probably gonna feel like it’s suddenly a really noisy place,” she added. “A lot of my patients tell me they hear so many things they never heard before,” like the sound of the wood crackling on a hardwood floor as you walk across it.

“Okay,” I replied, finally understanding the meaning of a phrase I heard a long time ago: that you can explain, until you’re blue in the face, to a fish what it’s like to walk on land. But until the fish actually gets out of the water and walks, they’ll never truly understand what it’s like.

“Take these home, and give them some time,” she added as we wrapped up our appointment. “It’ll probably take your brain a little time to adjust.”

Keith Richards once described the moment he heard Chuck Berry play guitar as the moment the world suddenly went from black-and-white to being in full technicolor. That essentially describes what the rest of my day was like — every moment was filled with sound.

When I got home, I walked in our backyard. I heard the wind rustling through the leaves of the trees, birds chirping and calling with a clarity and a volume I hadn’t heard in ages. Every step I took on the brick pathway that curls around the outside of our house, I picked up the sound of my shoes grinding and scraping across the red clay surface.

Inside, it was the same. On our kitchen counter, I shuffled through our mail, the sound of the paper gliding across my fingers not blending in with the background, but loud, front and center. The hardwood floors in our kitchen were like a popcorn kettle crackling, as every step made each plank of wood snap and pop.

The next morning, I got up like I normally do and made coffee — the machine was a symphony of sound, hissing and steaming — and then sat outside on our front steps. I wish I could describe to you the sound of the birds calling and singing; it was like nothing I’d heard since I was a kid, when we used to visit extended family in small-town Georgia.

As I sat there, for a moment I wondered, “let’s take these hearing aids out and just test how much of a difference they’re really making.” So I did.

When I say this, it will sound like an exaggeration, but it’s true: taking the tiny little devices out of my ears, it was like putting a pillow up to my ears, or stuffing them with cotton. I couldn’t believe the difference.

And that, of course, made me wonder: all these years, all this time I haven’t been using hearing aids but really have needed them: what have I been missing? What of the stimuli that’s coming my way from all around my environment have I not been picking up?

I’ve been walking around in this world, probably bombarded by sounds that were there — but I didn’t know they were there. I had no idea. They were all around me, and I probably missed them. For all that time, my perception of what was going on in the world around me was missing some pretty big pieces, and I had no idea.

After those first few days, what the audiologist said proved right: my brain has adjusted. I don’t hear everyday sounds like the birds, or our hardwood floors, with quite the volume I did when I first put the hearing aids in my ears. The world has quieted down again — just a bit, anyway.

Now, I can hear conversation in restaurants; I can hear what my co-workers are saying when we meet, and I hear what my wife is saying when we talk. All things that were problematic, sometimes almost impossible, before.

I’m also trying to just pay closer attention, too — since I missed so much before, and now I can hear things I couldn’t, I find myself leaning in a little more. Not pretending I’d heard, and then having no idea what actually had been said. Actually participating, you know?

Have you ever experienced anything like this, and if so, how did it turn out for you? What was your response? I’d love to know — and, as always, let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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