On a cold winter morning in 1977, with snow that reached to the middle of our windows, I cried in my mother’s lap. The pain inside my ears was excruciating and it wouldn’t go away. I remember my mother cradling me with a pinched expression, trying to reass...ure me everything would be better soon. Of course, my ear infection did get better, but when it left, it took something away: my hearing.
My hearing didn’t leave all at once, but the ear infection started the process. At least, that’s what we believe. Before my illness, I’d never had any problems hearing or understanding, but after – well, that’s a different story.
Hearing loss crept up on me slowly, nearly undetected. It started when I first complained to my mother in early 1978 of a horrible ringing in my ears. She assured me it would go away, but it didn’t. It never left me. The condition is called tinnitus, and it’s not really a ringing, but a cacophony of sounds generated in the brain. Sometimes it’s quiet, some days I have a veritable symphony of constant tones in innumerable pitches and frequencies. Some days the lower pitches are loud. Other days, the high squeals that resemble a trio of badly-tuned flutes invades my head. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between the humming of my refrigerator and the noises in my head.
I’ve grown used to them. I’ve had to. If I let the sounds bother me, I’d have gone crazy a long time ago. It’s hard to imagine a time in my life when my head has been silent of these sounds, and I supposed I’ll always have them. I often wonder if the noises make it seem as if I have less hearing than I actually do, because there are times when my head is so noisy, it’s hard to hear anything.
When I was 14, my parents finally began to suspect I wasn’t just daydreaming in class. I was generally a good student, but during my first semester of high school, I failed a simple health class. I told my parents I didn’t know I’d had homework. Our teacher had a habit of not writing the assignments on the board, and if I wasn’t watching her, I didn’t know she’d given us homework.
That January, we found out I had sensorineural hearing loss. Nerve deafness. It’s not really the nerves that are damaged, but rather the tiny hairs in the cochlea. They were dying, and there was no way to reverse that. Once those little hairs shriveled up and died, that was it. I was fitted with in-the-ear hearing aids. My hair was short, so when I wore them, I looked like Bride of Frankenstein with the little nubs sticking out of my ears. For some reason, I was oblivious to the potential embarrassment that most teenagers would feel. I guess it was because I was happy I was hearing things a little better. I was lucky, too. The kids in my school thought my hearing aids were a novelty, and wanted to know more about them, when they could have easily teased me about them.
When I was 17, I got the behind-the-ear hearing aids. At the time, in 1986, they were a new kind of aid. Because the sound traveled a bit of a longer distance, it was less distorted by the processor by the time it reached my ear. The only problem with these is if I turned them up too loud, they squealed. More often than not, I never heard them squeal, so there were many times throughout my high school days when I probably walked through the halls, hearing aids squealing like piglets.
I didn’t let my hearing loss keep me from doing the things I loved. I was raised in a musical family. My brothers, sister and I sang and did dance routines while my mother played piano. I sang in choir in 9th grade, played the French horn all through my middle and high school years, and in my junior and senior years, I took French. Two things I was intensely proud of: my ability to be in tune every single time our band director did the pre-class tune-up, and my winning 2nd place in regional French poetry recital contest two years in a row.
There were times when kids were cruel to me. I became an officer in marching band my senior year. There was a girl, Melissa, who had always been pretty snooty to me. I could tell she felt I wasn’t good enough to kiss her feet. She wasn’t too happy with the fact that I became a French Horn officer and it became exceedingly evident one day when a friend of mine overheard her tell the drum major, “I can’t stand Trina. She never hears me when I tell her what to do!” Within minutes of hearing this, my friend Rachel told me what she’d heard, angry and red-faced. I felt a heaviness in my gut because I knew there were other kids who thought the same about me. But I pretended like nothing was wrong, and I did my best to ignore it all.
The year after I graduated high school, I met a French foreign exchange student named Sophie through a lady at my church. Sophie and I hit it off and we often went shopping and spent hours talking. She used to tell me my accent was good enough to pass as a native French speaker, and she was even more amazed when she discovered I had a hearing loss.
Her words of encouragement inspired me to major in French in college. I wanted to travel the world and be a tour guide. I did well in my French class my first year of college. I even took a summer course in German, where a classmate of mine became obsessed with the word “zwölf,” the German word for “twelve.” He would sit behind me and whisper “zwölf” sensuously, as if it were some kind of verbal aphrodisiac. It annoyed the hell out of me, when, out of the blue, he would whisper it, exaggerating the ‘L’ sound and chuckling to himself. I wanted to slap him.
My second year of college my hearing took a sudden nose dive. I found myself struggling to understand my French professor, even though I knew the words and could pronounce them. I couldn’t understand his voice. I craned my neck, obsessively watched his mouth form the accent égue or the circumflex. One day, mid-semester, I sat teary-eyed before him in his office, asking to drop his class. I didn’t want to, but I knew I couldn’t keep up any longer. I think he was as sorry to see me go as I was to leave. I’d done well in his class the year before and being forced to abandon my dreams was a hard pill to swallow.
Signing that withdrawal slip was tantamount to signing a resignation letter to my dreams. I knew I’d never be a world traveler. I think that’s where my problems really started, now that I think about it. I’d always wanted to be free, to travel the world. I wanted to see things I’d only heard about on TV or in movies. I wanted to live overseas. The worse my hearing became, though, the dimmer those dreams became. I think it was then that I started to understand the reality of my situation, and that depressed me.
by Trina W.C.
My hearing didn’t leave all at once, but the ear infection started the process. At least, that’s what we believe. Before my illness, I’d never had any problems hearing or understanding, but after – well, that’s a different story.
Hearing loss crept up on me slowly, nearly undetected. It started when I first complained to my mother in early 1978 of a horrible ringing in my ears. She assured me it would go away, but it didn’t. It never left me. The condition is called tinnitus, and it’s not really a ringing, but a cacophony of sounds generated in the brain. Sometimes it’s quiet, some days I have a veritable symphony of constant tones in innumerable pitches and frequencies. Some days the lower pitches are loud. Other days, the high squeals that resemble a trio of badly-tuned flutes invades my head. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between the humming of my refrigerator and the noises in my head.
I’ve grown used to them. I’ve had to. If I let the sounds bother me, I’d have gone crazy a long time ago. It’s hard to imagine a time in my life when my head has been silent of these sounds, and I supposed I’ll always have them. I often wonder if the noises make it seem as if I have less hearing than I actually do, because there are times when my head is so noisy, it’s hard to hear anything.
When I was 14, my parents finally began to suspect I wasn’t just daydreaming in class. I was generally a good student, but during my first semester of high school, I failed a simple health class. I told my parents I didn’t know I’d had homework. Our teacher had a habit of not writing the assignments on the board, and if I wasn’t watching her, I didn’t know she’d given us homework.
That January, we found out I had sensorineural hearing loss. Nerve deafness. It’s not really the nerves that are damaged, but rather the tiny hairs in the cochlea. They were dying, and there was no way to reverse that. Once those little hairs shriveled up and died, that was it. I was fitted with in-the-ear hearing aids. My hair was short, so when I wore them, I looked like Bride of Frankenstein with the little nubs sticking out of my ears. For some reason, I was oblivious to the potential embarrassment that most teenagers would feel. I guess it was because I was happy I was hearing things a little better. I was lucky, too. The kids in my school thought my hearing aids were a novelty, and wanted to know more about them, when they could have easily teased me about them.
When I was 17, I got the behind-the-ear hearing aids. At the time, in 1986, they were a new kind of aid. Because the sound traveled a bit of a longer distance, it was less distorted by the processor by the time it reached my ear. The only problem with these is if I turned them up too loud, they squealed. More often than not, I never heard them squeal, so there were many times throughout my high school days when I probably walked through the halls, hearing aids squealing like piglets.
I didn’t let my hearing loss keep me from doing the things I loved. I was raised in a musical family. My brothers, sister and I sang and did dance routines while my mother played piano. I sang in choir in 9th grade, played the French horn all through my middle and high school years, and in my junior and senior years, I took French. Two things I was intensely proud of: my ability to be in tune every single time our band director did the pre-class tune-up, and my winning 2nd place in regional French poetry recital contest two years in a row.
There were times when kids were cruel to me. I became an officer in marching band my senior year. There was a girl, Melissa, who had always been pretty snooty to me. I could tell she felt I wasn’t good enough to kiss her feet. She wasn’t too happy with the fact that I became a French Horn officer and it became exceedingly evident one day when a friend of mine overheard her tell the drum major, “I can’t stand Trina. She never hears me when I tell her what to do!” Within minutes of hearing this, my friend Rachel told me what she’d heard, angry and red-faced. I felt a heaviness in my gut because I knew there were other kids who thought the same about me. But I pretended like nothing was wrong, and I did my best to ignore it all.
The year after I graduated high school, I met a French foreign exchange student named Sophie through a lady at my church. Sophie and I hit it off and we often went shopping and spent hours talking. She used to tell me my accent was good enough to pass as a native French speaker, and she was even more amazed when she discovered I had a hearing loss.
Her words of encouragement inspired me to major in French in college. I wanted to travel the world and be a tour guide. I did well in my French class my first year of college. I even took a summer course in German, where a classmate of mine became obsessed with the word “zwölf,” the German word for “twelve.” He would sit behind me and whisper “zwölf” sensuously, as if it were some kind of verbal aphrodisiac. It annoyed the hell out of me, when, out of the blue, he would whisper it, exaggerating the ‘L’ sound and chuckling to himself. I wanted to slap him.
My second year of college my hearing took a sudden nose dive. I found myself struggling to understand my French professor, even though I knew the words and could pronounce them. I couldn’t understand his voice. I craned my neck, obsessively watched his mouth form the accent égue or the circumflex. One day, mid-semester, I sat teary-eyed before him in his office, asking to drop his class. I didn’t want to, but I knew I couldn’t keep up any longer. I think he was as sorry to see me go as I was to leave. I’d done well in his class the year before and being forced to abandon my dreams was a hard pill to swallow.
Signing that withdrawal slip was tantamount to signing a resignation letter to my dreams. I knew I’d never be a world traveler. I think that’s where my problems really started, now that I think about it. I’d always wanted to be free, to travel the world. I wanted to see things I’d only heard about on TV or in movies. I wanted to live overseas. The worse my hearing became, though, the dimmer those dreams became. I think it was then that I started to understand the reality of my situation, and that depressed me.
by Trina W.C.
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