This morning I forced myself to go to my first, official ENT appointment in years, in order to consult with a highly recommended professional. I was urged to make an appointment with him after I told my friend about my hearing loss and tinnitus, which I have refused to deal with because my last ENT visit (which took place so many years ago I can’t remember) upset me so thoroughly I blocked out both it and the name of the doctor who claimed I needed to embrace my hearing loss, love my tinnitus, and not worry my pretty little head about things out of my control. I hated being patronized and treated like a moron, but I did what he said, didn’t I? Instead of facing up to the fact that I have hearing problems, then finding a different doctor who would treat me like an adult, I put up and shut up. What a poor, pitiful Pearl am I.
My friend said it was time for me to face up to my hearing problems, which might be why I told him the ringing had reached such a high pitch that it was no longer easy to ignore or love. I called his beloved Dr. Tinnitus for an appointment, back in September, but I was told I’d have to wait till today to see him. I didn’t tell my friend this, but I temporarily returned to pretending not to have a hearing problem, even though I do (just ask my husband, who yells at me that he’s not mumbling, even though I yell back at him that he is), until this morning, when I reality reared its ugly head and made me push a red button whenever I heard a sound, or didn’t, more often than not.
I hated failing those tests, so maybe that’s why I argued with the audiologist after I was through flunking myself. I told her that the test couldn’t have been conclusive, since the room I was sitting in wasn’t soundproof. I told her it had been hard for me to concentrate on the sounds she was supposedly making in my ear, because the loud voices from the women shouting and laughing in the room across from my testing room mixed with the high-pitched ringing in my ears from my tinnitus, and masked sounds I might’ve gotten right. She said it didn’t really matter – that my hearing loss was what it was, so I continued to try to convince her that the results would’ve been different had the conditions been more optimal. She pooh-poohed me, then attempted to read the results to me, but since I was too upset to comprehend what she was talking about, I stopped listening.
She handed me a pink copy of my test, which was a waste of time, because I couldn’t decipher it on my own, and told me to return to the waiting room to wait for Dr. Tinnitus, the expert. He turned out to be nice, but his lilty Irish-accented voice lulled me away from paying attention to his long, involved explanations comparing the hairs inside my ears to broken piano strings. Even though I was unable to absorb his technical explanations, I was able to understand that he has tinnitus, but that he’s a lucky duck, because it doesn’t interfere with his life one iota. Well, bully for him. It’s making mine a living hell.
He must’ve sensed he was losing me, so he launched into another long story about the time he got progressive lenses, and they made him so dizzy he reeled all over the place until he got used to wearing them. Obviously, he thought sharing his personal stories would make me feel better about how noisy and upsetting it was going to be to wear hearing aids, so I interrupted him and said that I never had trouble wearing my progressive lenses. He kept talking, instead of changing his tune because, after all, he wasn’t all that interested in me – only himself.
He ended up offering me a few alternative therapies if I didn’t want to wear hearing aids – but one I refused outright was Zoloft. I told him strong drugs and I don’t mix, and that I wasn’t even going to think about trying Zoloft, an antidepressant, as an off-label tinnitus inhibitor. He went on and on, extolling it, but I blocked him out until he wound down, and launched into a different riff on how wearing hearing aids will make it possible for me to hear so well I’ll hear myself crunch on things (he mentioned apples) when I eat, and when I’m done crunching, they’ll mask my tinnitus. He told me that like progressive lenses, I’d need to wear the hearing aids at all times in order to get used to them. But, if I’m hearing myself crunch, how can he expect me to want to wear them? Crunching drives me crazy, I told him – but he just Kanga and Baby Roo-ed me (maybe because he ran out of stories about himself) and told me to make a hearing aid appointment at the front desk.
Here’s the very best news of the day about those two hearing aids he said I will need. I have to pay for them out of pocket, since insurance doesn’t cover them. Boy, oh boy, I can’t wait to fork over $6-8,000 so I can hear myself crunch and think, but I’m worth it, right? Please, tell me what the upside of this bargain will be, because I have two weeks to chicken out of returning to the very same audiologist I most probably alienated (after questioning her testing conditions), who’ll probably sell me two left hearing aids as payback.
I’ve become that deaf, dumb, blind kid, minus the mean game of pinball.
Ding.
What? Didn’t hear the sound of one hand clapping when my striped ball went through the flipper? Chalk it up to celestial interference, that damned tree falling in the forest, or my husband, who whispers and sometimes lip syncs – I swear he does.
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