Hoo-boy! Hearing loss can sure change a girl’s life.
It transforms you into a pardon-me-parrot. You become an ear-poker, making sure your hearing aids are there and working. You turn into a vigilante, looking for rule-breakers of the Gospel of Good Communication; heaven help the husband or friend or child who doesn’t face us, speak up, or repeat themselves, graciously, upon demand. Fines are doubled when the captioning has been turned off in our presence. When traveling, you’re a contestant in an obstacle course of missed connections and airline staff who fall into two camps: those who ‘get it’ and those who offer you a Braille card and a wheelchair.
But wait, there’s scarier stuff!
Hearing loss can also cause fires, flooding, electrical outages, high veterinarian bills, and destruction of personal property such as cookware, furniture and carpets.
Occasionally, I secretly wish I’d been assigned a different disability, something not quite so all-encompassing, something a little more localized. Toe fungus. Kneecap psoriasis. Mismatched breasts. With respect to people who have these issues, I’m sure they carry their own stress, but tell me: do they interfere with your ability to communicate—on the job or with your kids? Do they keep you from enjoying the movie, or understanding the pharmacist? And wouldn’t you say that they do NOT cause flooding in your RV?
It happened last week—the second time I’ve caused a flood. Actually it was my hearing loss that caused it, but since I and my hearing loss are “one”, I take full responsibility.
The Hearing Husband and I recently traveled from British Columbia to Ontario in Flag, our beautiful recreational vehicle. After several long days of driving, we arrived at a provincial park outside Toronto that we love for its large sites, forests and waving grasses. We went to bed early. The Hearing Husband crashed first, while I moved around the camper doing the little things that close our world down for the night. And, unusually for me, I did this deaf, having taken out my hearing aids early. I mean, what’s to hear? In the small bathroom, I washed my face and removed my contact lenses, becoming practically blind as well as deaf. Then I hit the sack.
At 4am, the Hearing Husband got up and immediately turned on the light. Not a good sign. After I scrambled to put in ‘my ears’ and put on my glasses, he said, “You left the tap running in the bathroom!” It had been running, slowly but surely, for five hours. If my hearing aids had been in, as they usually are, I would have realized I hadn’t pushed the tap fully off. he camper had partially flooded, but as we were on an ever-so-slight tilt to the left, the water ran mostly down one side. Because the bathroom sink/shower tank had backed up, there was half an inch of water in the bathroom, from where it trickled down the steps into the main camper and outside through whatever openings the water could find. Unfortunately, we keep the cats’ litter box in the shower stall (when not using it to shower) and Charlie couldn’t reach it. No way was this 20 lb. feline going to wade through a flood just to pee! He ‘went’ on the couch.
But we’re lucky; there seems to be no lasting damage except for an ever-so-slight lingering odor on the couch, where Charlie had waited out the deluge. But this can happen even with my hearing aids in. When my son was two, he managed, in the blink of an eye, to flip on a kitchen tap without my seeing or hearing it. It ran long enough to snuff out the phone lines and the electric garage door opener for 24 hours.
As I wrote in my blog Recipes for a Good Cook with Hearing Loss,
(March 6, 2012) I try not to leave the kitchen while I am boiling eggs, because I’ve ruined more than one pot, boiling the eggs into a hard, black mass. Like many people with hearing loss, I just don’t hear dingity-ding-dingy sounds that should alert us to danger:
Running water
The eggs or anything are about to boil over
A fire is crackling (when there should be no fire)
Your child is too quiet
That scratching sound of cat-claws on your sofa
Etc., etc., etc.
And the point of this story? Hearing aids aren’t the only expense in the hearing loss life! Save money—and be safer—by making sure to turn off taps, lights, fires and fireplaces. Keep alerting systems battery-fresh.
And maybe invest in a backup litter box.
