When You Get Hearing Aids

"Hello? Hello?"

The nervousness you have about getting hearing aids is nothing compared to how you will feel once you get them. Driving home, feeling as if your ears have been stuffed with fingerling potatoes, you'll discover that your car is falling apart. You will hear every rattle, clunk, hiss and groan that your passengers have been hearing and ignoring for years. You will not be able to tell if your wheels are about to fall off or if you merely have four flat tires -- but you'll be sure one of these is the case, based on the thunderous knocking coming from below the floorboard.

Expect to stay jumpy through the next few days.

Do you need to call a plumber, or has the toilet flush always been so boisterous? Is your computer dying, or has the fan motor always been so persistent?

"What's that?!" you'll yell to your friends, gathered in your kitchen for Sunday brunch.

"Just a truck going down the street," one will answer. (The others will have answered, mystified, "What was what?")

"What's going on? What's happening?!" you'll blurt a few minutes later, your eyes darting to the kitchen window, expecting to see an escaped zoo panther lounging on your back patio.

"That's how the birds always sound," another friend replies, having caught on, just a bit, to your new life.

"Really? Wow, that loud?" you'll murmur, starting to realize that the world might be even more amazing than you'd previously thought. Later, when you are nearly hypnotized listening to the rumbly, layered depths of your cat purring, you are certain of it.

About a week in to your new adventures in sound, you'll realize the audiologist who sold you your hearing aids is a crook. They're broken! They've completely stopped working! You've got nothing but chunks of dead plastic sitting in your ears! The audiologist's receptionist has heard these complaints before.

"Have you changed the batteries yet?" she asks.

No, it didn't occur to you to change the batteries. Batteries will last about four to seven days, she reminds you, inviting you to put fresh batteries into your new hearing aids, then call back if you still have problems.

You change your batteries for the first time. There's no need to call back.

******

Twenty-five years on, I am still delighted at all the things there are to hear, and I am occasionally still confused. If I turn on the shower before I've taken out my hearing aids (you don't want to get them wet), I am stunned by a sudden cacaphony of unknown origin. It takes me a moment to realize I need to take my hearing aids out. When I do, the sound of the shower returns to its familiar, comforting hum. When I'm driving and see flashing lights in the distance, I immediately punch the radio off and open my window, so I can more easily hear which direction the emergency vehicle is heading. If you look at me as if I just spoke in a foreign language, I realize I misunderstood what you said and came out with a completely nonsensical statement. (But we will discuss your - ahem - poor enunciation another time.)

Cell phones, with their endless variety of ring tones, are one of my favorite challenges. Was that a phone? Was that your phone? Was that my phone? You can catch me, these days, surreptitiously bobbing towards my purse (wherein my cell phone rests), like one of those toy drinking birds. Where my purse is – in the supermarket cart, next to me in the restaurant booth, hanging off my shoulder – determines the angle and depth of my bob. Sometimes I will just hold my purse up to my ear, like an overly enthusiastic shopping channel hostess.

If you really want to see me flummoxed, put a ringing phone into a TV show. How many times have I jumped up to answer my non-ringing phone, while on screen some detective is learning, because he answered his own ringing phone, that another body has been found? Probably as many times as I've missed your phone call, because I was watching TV and ruminating on how much the show's background music sounds like, well, a phone ringing.

What's that? You say I've been missing so many of your calls that you're starting to think I'm screening you? Oh no; I'm sure I just didn't hear the phone ring.