“Do you want some candy?”
My parents whispered that seductive phrase to four-year-old me from the end of a short hallway. They had begun to suspect that my hearing was impaired and they knew that the sweet offer of candy would perk my ears right up. The fact that I didn’t respond confirmed their fears and began a years-long quest to find out why I couldn’t hear very well. The hearing in my left ear was about 20 percent.
My sinuses got flushed on a regular basis (ouch! And yuck!), my ears got the wax dug out (just yuck those times) and surgeries were scheduled—tonsils, out! Adenoids, out! Then the big one—a stapedectomy when I was 19 and referred to a world-renowned ear clinic in Los Angeles. The surgeon discovered a surprise in the middle section of my left ear, where I was missing the stapes, the stirrup-shaped ear bone closest to the inner ear. Sound vibrations are passed from these tiny bones to the inner ear, where the brain snags it and interprets it. Fortunately, and oddly, the lack of the stapes on one side was an anomaly—typically bilateral biological defects impact both sides of the body. Nature kindly left me with one working ear.
I compensated somewhat for the missing stapes—I was an adequate lip-reader, and I was accustomed to walking and sitting on the left side of friends, so I could hear with my “good” ear. Friends joked about “being on my good side.” The ear surgeon transplanted a donor bone into my ear—but it did not give me back my hearing. The hearing experts said my brain was already compensating for the lost bone and couldn’t process sound with the artificial one.
Hearing loss is a silent killer of social life, professional growth and, to some extent, relationships. I don’t know what I haven’t heard all these years, but at the risk of sounding like Yogi Berra, it’s significant. I miss social cues, nuance, jokes—much of the connective tissue of communication. It’s probably not a surprise I write for a living, but it does require talking to a lot of people in order to tell their stories. I live in fear of mis-hearing what someone’s saying to me. For decades I hid my impairment, while trying to rectify it with hearing aids that didn’t help. Now that the hearing in my “good” ear is declining with age, I have realized anew what a loss this is and I am determined to do what I can in order to hear better.
As it turns out, the ear bone’s connected to the wishbone. KH
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