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Life's much better after getting a little volume control

By JAN GLIDEWELL
Published February 12, 2007

I got through an entire movie the other night without ever once turning to my wife and saying, "What did he say?"

The movie-going experience for those sitting near me was probably improved by that accomplishment, and my life since acquiring hearing aids last month has been vastly improved.

It was about 15 years ago that I wrote about the fact that my hearing was beginning to fail and how I first noticed it when I became outraged at hearing a commercial referring to cookies that were half-chocolate and half-vanilla as "mulatto."

The term, used to describe persons of mixed African and European ancestry is not exactly pejorative, but it is hardly ever used anymore and, I ranted at the television set, not to describe a cookie that was half-brown and half-white.

I was relieved and a little embarrassed when someone informed me the commercial was for Milano cookies sold by Pepperidge farm.

Then I became concerned.

I had snapped at a ticket clerk at a zoo who asked if I was "serious" when I said I wanted a ticket. It turned out she was asking if I was a "senior."

When I wrote about those experiences I received an angry letter from one reader taking me to task for making fun of the hearing-impaired.

I wrote back to remind him that I had done a lot of volunteer work for those with hearing problems (including three 100-hour stints sitting on a telephone pole for the West Pasco Sertoma Speech and Hearing Foundation) and that I was, after all, making fun of myself.

But it got to be less fun as time went on.

Co-workers began speaking to me in exaggeratedly loud voices, irritating me, but in a few years I was having to ask them to speak even loader than that.

People with normal hearing found it painful to ride in my car if I was playing music, because the volume was so high.

My wife also has a slight hearing impairment from a childhood injury, so we could watch television together. But her adult children and visiting guests would sit with their hands over their ears.

I am a movie buff, and I detest people who talk during movies, so I had to either ask in a soft whisper (which my wife had trouble hearing) what was said, or lip-read, if the person speaking was on-screen, or try to figure out dropped words and phrases from the context of what I could understand.

I stopped listening to music because it all sounded muddled; everyone in the world seemed to be mumbling, and I became one of those annoying old people whose blinker lights stay on forever because my steering wheel blocks the dashboard arrows, and I couldn't hear the clicking.

Finally I found out that Veterans Affairs might be able to help because it was very likely that my hearing loss came from years of training and some combat during which I was exposed to small-arms fire, explosions, artillery fire, engine noise from airplanes with the doors removed for parachute operations and hours of sitting with radio headphones on, copying Morse code.

I dreaded confronting the VA bureaucracy. And it did take a lot of document-gathering and 11 months of forms, appointments and more forms, but it actually wasn't all that frustrating.

I met a lot of nice, helpful people who, along with the Pasco County Veterans' Service Office and the office of my member of Congress, whose constituent service I like a lot better than I do her politics, got the job done.

The state-of-the-art aids I have work wonderfully and are practically invisible. They even have settings that, in most chain theaters and a few of the larger live venues, makes them work like stereo headphones.

I have started listening to music again (not a big thrill to those close to me who don't love Florida folk music and the Grateful Dead).

I feel like my life has been improved 25 percent, and if any of you out there are wondering if it is time for hearing aids, I urge you to go find out and get them if you need them.

Minutes after I put them in for the first time I walked out of the VA clinic in Brooksville, and was startled by a sound that I then identified as a bird singing. I almost cried.

These are your tax dollars at work, and that is a phrase I have spoken and written many, many times with ironic or sarcastic intent.

This time I just want to say, "Thank you."

[Last modified February 11, 2007, 20:28:37]