Dealing with Hearing Loss

Oddly enough, I've come to think that losing my hearing was one of the outstanding things that ever happened to me, as it led to the publication of my very first novel. But it took a while for me to accept that I was losing my hearing and needed aid.

I think that no matter how challenging things get, you can make them much better. I have my parents to praise for that. They never tolerated me to think that I couldn't perform something because of my hearing loss. One of my mother's beloved sayings when I expressed doubt that I could do something was, "Yes, you can.".

I was born with a mild hearing loss but began to lose more of my hearing when I was a major in college. I speculated why I couldn't hear a phone that I could hear just the day before.

Late-deafened people can always recollect the occasions when they first stopped being able to hear the critical things in life like doorbells and telephones ringing, people talking in the next room, or the tv set. When you learned that President Kennedy had been shot or when you learned about the terror attack at the World Trade Center, it's sort of like remembering where you were.

Unbeknown to me at the moment, that was only the outset of my downward spiral, as my hearing grew gradually worse. I was young and still vain enough not to want to buy a hearing aid. I struggled through college by sitting up front in the school room, straining to read lips and asking people to speak up, sometimes again and again.

I knew that I had to buy a hearing aid. I was still vain enough to wait a few months while I let my hair grow out a bit before taking the plunge but I eventually did buy a hearing aid.

Soon, my hair length didn't matter much, as the hearing aids got reduced and smaller. They also got better and better at picking up sound. The early aids did little more than make sounds louder evenly across the board. That doesn't work for those of us with nerve deafness, as we may have more hearing loss in the high pitches than in the lower ones. The newer digital and programmable hearing aids go a long way toward improving on that. They can be set to match different kinds of hearing loss, so you can, say, increase a particular high frequency more than other frequencies.

Once I got my auditory aid and had the capacity to hear again, I could concentrate on other things that were important to me-- like my learning, my career and writing that first novel! I didn't realize it then, but that first listening devices actually liberated me to go on to bigger and better things.

I had long imagined writing a novel, but like others kept putting it off. As I began to lose an increasing amount of of my hearing, it was a job just to keep up on duty, let alone doing much else. Once I got the hearing aid, I no longer had to worry about a lot of the things I did before, and I began to think that writing a novel would be the perfect hobby for me. Anyone can write notwithstanding of whether they can hear. I was also determined to demonstrate that losing my hearing would not hold me back.

My first novel was published in 1994 and my fifth in the summer of 2005. I honestly believe that I would never have sat down at the computer and banged out that first novel if I hadn't lost so much of my hearing. That's why I sometimes think that losing my hearing was one of the best things that ever happened to me.