I’ve got an audiology appointment this week and, I’ll admit it, I’m nervous.
Things have changed. I’m not hearing as well as I was just a few weeks ago. Noisy situations almost bring me to my knees. Speech isn’t always clear.
As the minutes tick towards my appointment in two days, my mind is doing pretzel knots with questions that I both ask and try to answer. (Which, of course, I can’t possibly do!)
Has my hearing level dropped in my ‘good ear’? If so, how much, and what will that mean?
Is it my hearing aid? Is the receiver on the blink? Has the transmitter gone wonky? Or both the receiver and the transmitter, or any other techno-bit that I can’t name? Or maybe my drying aid has reached the end of its useful life, and my aid is full of moisture. Or wax. Streaming sounds fine but hearing acoustically in the real world is when I have problems.
That’s a good thing, right? It means my actual hearing hasn’t become worse?
So, maybe I’ll need a brand-new hearing aid, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Although, then I would have to visit my cochlear implant audiologist, who lives in another city, to pair the new aid and my CI to my devices.
But hey, maybe it’s my tinnitus! Inexplicably (although what is truly explainable about tinnitus), it has ramped up since the spring and OMG, has it finally reached the stage where it compresses my speech perception?!
I’ll be seeing my ‘old’ hearing professional, the one I used to work with. She has moved to a new clinic (see last week’s article on changing your hearing care professional) and we were a good team, so I am feeling good about that. Except – I’m sure she will insist on a hearing assessment, always a challenge in the presence of profound inner head noise. (I’ll tell you a secret: being in the sound booth is not my favorite activity.)
This mental swirl of oh-no’s and what-ifs will play on a continual nervous loop over the next couple of days.
If you’re a person with hearing loss, you may have experienced similar fear, doubts and anxiety. And for those who think that I, as a professional author, speaker and advocate in the hearing loss arena, should have these emotions aced by now, that’s not how it works. I still experience these feelings every time my hearing hits a major sound bump. For most of us with hearing loss, it’s a normal and reocurring stage of the hearing loss journey.
But the difference is now, in spite of my nerves, I have the comfort of knowing that there will be solutions, or at least partial solutions. But it will be a couple of days of before we get to that stage, so I’ll do my best to stay calm.
I’ll go for a run. I will meditate. I will do some writing, watch some good television, catch up on my reading, text with my family and friends, and maybe try to beat the Hearing Husband at a game of crib.
That’s all I can do until Thursday. I’ll keep you posted.
