Part III: Because There's Depression

It's been a few days and on Monday was the first day that I wore the hearing aid for 8 hours but it was also relatively quiet, which made it easier. No construction at work, not a lot of people were in (working from home, mostly) and so overall, it was just easier to have it in. At the end of the work day, I took it off to go home and then when I got home, I put it back in. Some friends came over, a jolly good time was starting to be had and then, I couldn't handle it anymore.

I had taken Kona (hearing aid) off but it felt like it was still in. And everything was loud. Too loud even, to the point where I couldn't distinctly hear anything. Everything was just this massive jumble and I strained so hard to just hear things clearly. My senses or whatever I used to rely on was (and still is) trying to sort through all the extra information. There's too much information coming in and that's not really dependent on whether or not I'm wearing the hearing aid sometimes.

Wednesday, June 19th

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Let's talk a bit about the depression. So I go in and out of depression fairly regularly and I hadn't mentioned this to my audiologist (not that I needed to). She did however hint that it would be overwhelming when I got the hearing aid and that at times it might be tough, but I needed to stick with it if I wanted to be successful.

So I've been trying to stick with it as best I can, but it's been tough. I get flustered at times and I'll take of the hearing aid, but then I feel then there feels like there's too much to process. When I put in the hearing aid, I have to reduce the other information that I'm taking in. I don't need to read lips or focus on body language but then I have to deter those processes that are quite normal for me and then focus instead on blocking out the new background sounds I'm hearing as well as focus on the new sounds I should be hearing. (Not sure, if that makes sense, but I'm going with it).

My depression has always been weird, but the sound imbalance and things I need to "learn" and things that I can't "unlearn" (more on that in a bit) means that my depression has been very difficult. There's been a notable uptake in my wine consumption and a whole lot of crying (not just about the hearing aid, but other things that I'm generally sad about).

About the "unable to unlearn" part, because I don't wear my hearing aid all of the time (and supposedly, nor should I), I can't just not read lips, decipher body language, or learn the natural rhythm of someone's voice -- I have to learn when to trade different skills for when it's in versus not. Hence the frustration.

Last night I went to a friend's wedding reception and early on in the night, I couldn't configure the hearing aid right and then part of it just popped out and I couldn't get it back in. I spent a good part of the night fighting with it and not very many people know that I have a hearing aid so it must have looked odd to see my continually meddling with my ear.

I'm working on it though but obviously there are still a lot of things to contend with. But I'm trying, I assure you. There's a part of me that gets overwhelmed, cries into the pillow, and feels that this isn't worth it. After all, I spent many years never really being troubled by this so why should it matter now? We'll see...

Part II: Adjusting Bagheera Kona Jinx

To review:

1. Had hearing loss as a kid, we never knew why or how it happened. Could have been that I never had it in the first place, but either way, the frequencies I couldn't hear were not determined till I was teenager.
2. Continued to not doing anything about it for years.
3. Finally booked an appointment (last week) and then got my hearing aid this week.
4. Also, finally named my hearing aid (because I do that) and it is called Bagheera Kona Jinx, or Kona for short. 

Mysteriously surrounded by Kona coffee candies.

I know that toward the end of my last post I started rushing -- with all the typing and my hearing aid being in and on, I was starting to get a headache. There isn't too much that I rushed through though. The fitting and the alteration of the programming for the hearing aid took about a full hour. That included the audiologist walking me through everything and answering all my questions. 

When she first programmed it without any alterations and put it on me, she spoke for a bit and it was... weird. I've used that word a lot the last few days. Her voice was suddenly very high pitched, very mechanical, and all these other sounds emerged that I couldn't discern. She spoke to me for a bit and told me that was the "raw" program set only to the frequencies lost and then turned it down.

Basically Kona (yes, the hearing aid) is programmed for two channels and each have a volume range. My base line program is lower and the last few days I've actually lowered it a bit. Hopefully in a week or so, I can handle the base line program without having to adjust the volume, but for now, there's a lot of sounds I'm not used to and are distracting. The second program seems a lot lower and I've only used it once, which is when I was walking outdoors for a bit. I still haven't quite gotten the hang of turning it on, off, up, or down. Furthermore, it seems like each thing that I do requires some kind of tweak -- if I'm at home, at work, on a call, outdoor, and so on. It's mildly disconcerting a lot of the time.

The first day I wore it (which was on Wednesday), I found myself (obviously) hearing a lot of things I hadn't ever heard before. What this also means though, is that I don't know what these sounds are. It's one thing to be suddenly cognizant of all the sounds that are around you, it's another thing to just start hearing them and not knowing what they all are. So normal sounds and loud sounds are amplified which makes it a bit more scarier but then there are these new background sounds. Suddenly active and passive listening aren't the same things anymore. 

What's probably the interesting thing is that people aren't the same anymore. I don't have the hearing aid all the way up or on all of the time, which means that my senses are somewhat baffled with the insufficient or influx of data being received. For anyone unsure of what that means, it's that when someone talks to me when the hearing aid is on, I can hear them, but their voice is more robust and therefore loud so much so that I find myself trying to really focus on their words instead of their rhythm of voice, which is something I'm used to doing before. Because I need to pay so much attention to the words, I can't focus on them (watching their face) since I need to look away to really process things. 

That's just people... let's talk about the first sounds that I heard. Like my jeans rustling as I walk, my sneakers squeaking, paper rustling when it's at my desk, or water running. One night I heard Shiva (one of the kittens) for the first time without having to put my ear close to him and I started crying. 

When new sounds come in or badger me, I have to seek them out to identify them. I have to know what it is which is sometimes really easy and other times, it's mostly just frustrating. Currently at my job, they are doing a bit of construction and naturally, I can't see where some of the new sounds are coming from. I can't really sit in small rooms because of the amplification of the new and old sounds. Calls are sometimes difficult as well so I find myself taking Kona off to take them.

The other thing about it is that I'm adjusting to the influx of sounds so are the people around me. Sometimes they forget and then I find myself near clutching my left ear. They'll talk to me the way they normally did, which is loudly, in order to convey their message (and they don't always need to do that anymore). Some didn't realize how severe or moderate the loss was, so they've been trying to adjust their own (and that's been pretty intriguing to watch and listen to). 

It's only been three days, by the way. So, my findings are still premature and I've got a bit more to go. At this point, it's time to thank quite a few people who have helped me out in the last three days. My boyfriend has been absolutely amazing as he has tried to learn alongside me exactly what I'm going through. My parents, who watch me through Skype, have also been awesome. And to my three friends who texted me nonstop while I was getting the fitting and programming done, thank you because it calmed me down quite a bit. Of course, thanks to my friends who are slowly learning that speech, dictation, and body language are evolving things for me.

I'll be updating this in a bit (if I remember) in a few days, to see how it goes from there. 

Part I: Hard of Hearing (or Being Stubborn)

So... I wasn't sure where to write this since I have 3 distinct blogs (and some others), but I figured that I'd start somewhere. This is going to be long, so you were forewarned. 

When I was younger, I didn't really know if I had hearing loss or not -- we had those quick check-ups in elementary school which included audio, sight, and the physical and I managed to pass them all.  But at the back of my head, I passed them all because I knew how to space the sounds in the audiology test to pass it and I memorized the eye chart. I didn't really think I was doing myself a disservice since this seemed to be a triumph of being one step ahead. (I was an elementary student so the logic wasn't quite there). A part of me did know that I wasn't hearing correctly though and nor was I seeing correctly but I assumed that this meant that I had to be a stronger person. It just meant, to me, that I needed to work harder. 

Of course, I was proven wrong on account of seeing when I performed poorly on a few tests because for the first time, my last name put me in the back of the class (we were seated in alphabetical order by last name and usually this put me in the front of the class). My parents were trying to get to the bottom of the recent shift in my grades and finally I told them that I simply couldn't see the blackboard anymore. They gave me a quick test at home (they asked me to read a Ritz cracker box from afar) and of course, I did poorly. 

Shortly after that, my doctor decided to retest my hearing as well and the exposure of the loss of hearing came up as well. Instead of using perfectly timed intervals, she dispersed them and found the hearing loss (but in all fairness, I wasn't trying to "pass" that test either). Both of these events happened when I was perhaps under the age 10. I got my glasses shortly thereafter but the hearing... well, that took a while. 

I finally got a full hearing test, audiometer and all, and the results were something like 50% loss in the left ear and 5-10% on the right. The problem with my left ear was that there were sporadic clusters that were missing (or just low) and that they couldn't issue a hearing aid (but they did offer to create custom ear plugs which we did not opt for). So that was the end of that.

I still happily wear my glasses to this day -- I love them all, and it's a part of me. It's been ~13 years (give or take) and now we can fast forward to a few weeks ago. We were in a mall complex swinging by Petco to restock on the kitten's necessities when I saw a hearing aid center and that point, I realized that maybe now was the time to look into it. After all, technology had to have improved in the last few years and even if I didn't have enough to warrant a hearing aid, at least I could figure out where I was in terms of loss.

After checking around with my insurance, I found a place and scheduled my appointment. I was nervous... I figured to myself, what if all this time I had been hearing correctly and I was just nuts? What if I really did lose that hearing, then what I do to adjust? The test itself was the same as I remembered it but actually much shorter, a lot less sounds, and a lot less headphones. When the test was over, instead of giving me a percentage of loss in each ear, they explained it a bit differently and showed me a chart. 

So here's how it breaks down (and this will reference the crude drawing that isn't labelled below), my right ear is fine; that first squiggly line that appears just below average but above the cut-off line for loss? That's my right ear. It's not great but not bad either. The one with a huge slope downward is my left ear. As my audiologist explained it, the frequencies I can hear are in line with hearing vowels. I cannot hear consonants (that the huge dip) and therefore rely on my right ear to compensate. (Please note that the crude drawing is crude and therefore not the exact chart but it conveys the idea of the difference between my ears).

When we did a quick review of my history, she said that likely at the time they couldn't program a hearing aid for my loss because they were analog. Now that hearing aids are digital, they could program one that is specific to my loss and rebuilding the sounds.

Of course, you might have noticed "rebuilding the sounds," which means that there was a lot of work ahead of me. I'd be hearing sounds I hadn't heard as a kid so I'd have to relearn them. In addition, I'd have to learn how to block out background sounds and learn to not rely on all my other senses as much to understand a conversation. I don't know any type of sign language, I never really thought that I spent enough time learning to lip read, but it turns out, I do rely on a few other things. I do rely on body language, the rhythm of a voice to populate missing sounds/words, and I lip read a bit. I logically follow thing and assume what was said at times (so if it were a conversation about astrophysics and I missed a few words, I could try to populate them based on how the conversation was going). 

In other words, before, I needed to really know people to hear them. Active listening and passive listening was going to change. Albeit slowly, nonetheless, it was going to change. 

And so, when the hearing test was complete, after the audiologist coached me through what changes I could expect and what needed to happen, I picked my first hearing aid. I knew, before we left the testing area that I wanted to ReSound Verso so when we went to go finalize the order, I got to choose my colour. I initially wanted to pick the all blue one (and therefore name it "Stitch") but I opted for the glossy black. I haven't named it yet, but here's a product image of it:

I have it and it's been a few days since I've been wearing it. I'd go through it now, but I think I'll save it for another post.