It will be seven months come the 13th of this month when my CI processor has expired, plunging me into total deafness.
This means seven months of not hearing my kids' voices;
not hearing my husband's voice;
unable to translate foreign doctors' lips without help from a nurse when my mother was in the hospital;
unable to hear the dog barking when there is someone at the door;
unable to hear the phone ringing;
unable to hear the boys' singing;
unable to hear the conversation around me;
unable to hear if there is something wrong with the car while driving back and forth to Lansing or to Lima, or even just around here in town;
missing out on the boys' winter concert;
missing out on church because I can't hear the pastor's sermons nor the hymns;
unable to volunteer at any school events;
feeling isolated from the world at large.
I do get out and about, but it takes a lot of energy to communicate now without the helpfulness of my CI processor to help navigate the world. I lip read. I don't know any sign language and I refuse to learn how to sign because the majority of the people in my world does not use sign language. I rely on lip reading and even that is a faulty way of communicating.
(Do you know people mutter a lot? They do. They tend to look away while they're talking and look down so I have to scrunch down to read their lips or they smile when they talk, which makes reading lips almost impossible. Or they talk fast and without taking a breath. Or they have a beard that covers their bottom lips and the mustache covers their top lips, plus if they're dirty beards, I cannot look at them. Even goatees are hard for me.)
I am exhausted by the end of the day from trying to read everyone's lips. I miss out on so much while people are talking. I am not saying people are mean-spirited because the majority of people are not mean. Most people are just clueless. They don't realize how much a person relies on their ears to hear conversations especially in a noisy environment.
One would think I have absolutely nothing in my ears, no sounds can penetrate the darkness that is in my ears. In a way, they're right. But I do "hear" something and it's like an ear worm; it's the same noise over and over. I have tinnitus. To read someone's lips over the roar of the sea in my ears can be near impossible some days. It takes twice as much energy to read your lips over the noise in my head. Sometimes, the noise is louder than your lips and sometimes, it's quieter and enables me to concentrate better. I never know which it will be.
And no, I am not crazy. As anyone who suffers from tinnitus will tell you, the noise is not a phantom noise. It is nerve endings in the inner ear firing off blanks to the brain. Mine just happens to be spectacular since I don't have a CI processor to tune it out. It is ALL I can hear. The tinnitus is considered to be ringing in the ear, as a basic definition. Mine varies. It can be an electric saw buzzing through my head, setting my teeth on edge. It can be a piano playing musical scales. (Yes, I am serious. It goes from lowest note to the highest note and some days, the highest note is bad enough to give me a headache.) On my favorite days, it can be just as soft and sweet as a lullaby, but that does not happen very often.
Ironically, one of the best cures to tame your tinnitus is to hear something different or to hear with a hearing aid, or in my case, a CI processor. And I don't even have that.
Hearing loss is invisible as you can't see the hearing loss in my ears. The side effects of hearing loss are not invisible, but it might as well be because no one is comfortable talking about it. No one asks about the processor (except for a couple of friends) and why it is taking the insurance company to provide me with a new one. No one stops and considers how isolating this has been. It is just easier not to say anything about it to anyone. It is also just as easy to stay home because I can while away the long hours with reading a book or working on a craft, than to struggle to understand people and try to fit in conversations that are swirling around and every time I turn, I'd catch the tail end of a different conversation and that would throw me for a loop. It is just easier to stay home and read a book. At least the characters don't talk out of turn for me.
It has been an incredibly slow seven months.
