Do you find it frustrating — exasperating even — when in conversation someone asks you to repeat yourself, and then says: sorry can you say that again?And then: really sorry, again? And then: once more?
Do you find it frustrating — exasperating even — when it keeps happening all the way along the conversation?
Do you find it frustrating — exasperating even — to be the person who is having to ask once, twice and three times to hear that again please, over and over?
Have you come to find that if you still can't hear a third time the only thing you can do is to pretend to have heard, nod and smile, and try to piece things together from context?
Are you the kind of person who needs to lean over the counter and say sorry can you say that again over and over?
Are you the kind of person who finds it necessary to wait until any noisy vehicle has gone past before you can even attempt to have a conversation?
This has been my muffled existence these past ten, maybe quite a few more, years.
Twenty years ago I was starting to notice it a little bit, and because we knew somebody in the business I ended up at his rooms one morning getting state of the art equipment put into my ears. He stood back and beamed, proud of his hi-tech kit and asked how's that?
I was too polite to say Mate it's like listening to the world through tin cans are you seriously telling me this is how I’ll be hearing the world for the rest of my days? A couple of days later I took them back and told him: Sorry, too soon, I think.
Not too soon any longer.
Have you ever found yourself riding a bike across Europe and having to ask your travelling companion to repeat himself many times throughout the day and realising that it's been many years since the two of you last spent this much time together and you have turned into someone in the intervening years whose stuffed hearing is a pain in the ass for everybody.
You finally begin to grasp just how much your long-suffering family have been putting up with.
A few days into the trip I said to Dick: First thing I’m doing when I get home is getting tested and fitted.
His endorsement was, to put it mildly, enthusiastic.
So now I'm home and what have I done?
I have acted.
I sought out reader and pub-quiz mate Chris McKay for guidance because I had watched him put in the aids and happily engage in the low-voice cross-table conversations that I'd found more or less inaudible, you'd think that right there would have been a clue, eh. But anyway here I am at last, and he's pointing me in the direction of the clinic just up Lake Road with his warm endorsement, and into the soundproof booth I go. On go the headphones and I listen for beeps and press a button, and in due course we have a graph of my hearing that I describe in a text to Karren.
I have mild hearing loss which can be wholly fixed with the aids, I write.
Mild! she replies.
I elaborate:
It’s a clinical term that means: relax, you’re not going deaf but I bet this has been driving everyone around you mad.
What I wrote yesterday about a life-changing experience was perhaps a little too much, but your speculations were lovely all the same.
Linda Burgess had a sweep of them, all tremendous:
a) They're building a new harbour bridge just for bikes
b) David Seymour has asked you to be in charge of his new ministry
c) A book, a movie, a knighthood
d) Something lovely to do with the daughter
e) All of the above
Winston Moreton suggested:
Something bike or radio related in Auckland. Just hope not NZME
And Archives Rock wondered if I might be the Crown Observer for WCC
(On that goddamned outrage, by the way, I wholly endorse this assessment by Simon Wilson: Suicide bombing by Tory Whanau’s opponents, destroying their own budget and possibly the council itself to get the government to move against her.)
But no, none of the above.
The marvellous thing that happened to me on Monday was: hearing aids.
These things are good, man they’re good.
They do not in the least make the world sound like tin cans. Well, okay, maybe a little bit. But only at the margins. And it is on the margins where I've become so very eager to hear sound of any kind. I don't care at all if it's a touch artificial or tinny. The big thing is I can make out the damn words again.
Yesterday I went into the pharmacy and did not have to lean over the counter to hear what they were asking me.
I went to the supermarket and I could hear what they were saying.
Last night I turned the TV volume down!
After he’d fitted me, I stood beside Lake Road talking to Soren the audiologist as an unbelievably noisy motorbike went by. I could hear every word he said.
After all that time of straining and missing the words at any kind of gathering at all, this just feels like magic.
I hadn’t told Mary-Margaret this was coming, so yesterday she had the same question as the rest of you.
Used to play this very loud. Still might.
