The Enormous Hearing Aid Dome

To understand my tale of unbridled joy achieved in the surgery of an ENT consultant, you should know that my hearing, or lack of it, is the bane of my life, and I suspect of the lives of many of those close to me, even though they're too nice to admit it. There's more about this in A Deaf Character.

It was January 2014 and a week after I'd been diagnosed with cancer, a week after that day on 27^th December when I'd done a pretty comprehensive job of persuading myself I wasn't going to be told that news. No, I was going to be told that it was nothing more than a scare.

Yep, would you believe it? I heard it clear as a bell. Never for a moment did I think they'd said, 'You're a grade three dancer'. My second question – and every body's second question I suspect (after every body's first question: is it terminal?)  –  Do you know if it's spread? was met with one of the most difficult answers that those brilliant medical people have to give:

We Don't Know.

There was nothing to say that it had spread, but nobody could be sure at this stage. And then came the biggy: had I had any persistent pain anywhere else? We talked about my neck. Like every second person, it seems, I never learnt to sleep correctly as I have an ongoing, but pretty bearable, sore neck. But I'd had that forever, it couldn’t be related to cancer, surely?

He asked if it had been around for over a few months and I responded with a whoosh of relief that it been there for, oh, probably my entire adult life.

'But what about your earache?' Hubbie said.

You know, for the first time in three months, I hadn't noticed my earache. It took a cancer diagnosis to trump it, but for those glorious few moments, it had subsided.

Thankfully, very quickly, the consultant assured me as best he could that it would be extremely unusual for breast cancer to have travelled to my ear. 'However,' he said, as we hung in the air, waiting for the 'but', 'I really think we need to get to the bottom of this.' 

You see, I'd already had three separate lots of antibiotics as whenever anyone looked down my ear, they winced and said that there was a horrible infection in there. He didn’t want me fighting an infection when I was about to undergo an operation and then onto chemo. Thus I was referred to ENT.

I took solace in the breast cancer surgeon's optimism but the earache was unsolved and not reacting to antibiotics and it's hard when you're in bed at night, with only your tinnitus and the darkness, for your thoughts not to fly to secondary cancer in the brain.

The ENT specialist was lovely. I specifically remember him saying to me that he was going to do everything in his power to ensure I left his surgery with an answer because I had enough to worry about. I am a sucker for anybody taking responsibility away from me. I am the archetypal non-control freak. I like nothing better than somebody telling me I'm going to be alright. If they say that, I believe them.

He looked down my ear with a much more technical piece of apparatus than found at the GP surgery.

'Right,' he said. 'This might hurt.'

No problem. As far as I was concerned, nothing could hurt more than the current pain in my ears. Bring it on!

I can only describe the next few minutes as playing my own special role in the Enormous Turnip. The instrument inserted into my ear produced a sort of 'sucking' feeling. But as quickly as it started, this not entirely unpleasant sensation stopped.

'I'm changing to a smaller instrument,' he said. 'Are you aware you have very narrow ear canals?' I laughed. If I had a pound for every time anyone in the medical profession has told me about the diminutive nature of my ear canals, well, I wouldn't be an impoverished writer any more.

By the time we'd moved to the third reduced sized implement, the consultant had his foot wedged on my chair as the small but oh, so powerful instrument pulled and sucked at the inside of my very narrow ear canal. My head swayed. This was no longer pleasant. I thought I was going to be sick but every time he asked if I needed a break, I told him to carry on. There was clearly something in my ear and we needed to get it out. I started counting to ten and got to 73.

Just like the Enormous Turnip, it sprang out with a pop which literally – yep, literally - sent the consultant reeling backwards. 'Phew!' he said, in a delightfully understated fashion, 'That was a stubborn one.' He held up the offending item, a mixture of pride and mirth covering his perspiring face.

'Do you recognise this?' he asked, bearing the tip of my hearing aid, the 'dome' in the trade, the removable bit which covers the receptor and goes directly into the ear. I say, 'removable', but must clarify that it is only to be removed for cleaning once outside of the ear canal. 'It happens more often than you think,' he said, in a kind attempt to placate my embarrassed shame – I told you he was lovely – 'You don't remember it coming away in your ear, then?'

The thing is, I do remember the moment he was referring to. I remember sitting in front of my mirror looking at the dome-less hearing aid, convinced I'd already replaced the tip. I asked the hubbie to have a look down my ear using the torch on his iPhone (Love is…) But when he couldn't see anything, I put it down to the advancement of my years, replaced it with another from the box, and never gave it another thought.

Instantly, the hearing pain was gone. I had to do everything in my power not to jump up and hug and squeeze the audiologist with every ounce of my being, for removing the pain, but also the fear that my stage two and hopefully curable grade three, caught early, breast cancer could actually be the treatable, but currently not curable stage four.

The hubbie and I shared a bottle of champagne that night, and it will always make me smile that only seven days after diagnosis, waiting for my operation, waiting for chemo, we were celebrating with champagne. Such is the strange world of Cancerville. I also remember running out into the waiting room and throwing myself on my husband in the way I'd stopped myself doing to the fortunate consultant, as I told him as well as I could through hysterical laughter, that he'd never guess what it was but it wasn’t a brain tumour.

Thankfully, he has pretty goddamn perfect hearing so he knew what I meant. 

If you're interested in hearing loss, you may like to read: Run That By Me Again and The Bottom of the Swimming Pool. 

Watch My Lips!

Hearing is not one of my strengths. I may have mentioned it before and it was certainly the subject of this post, when I spoke about the best Christmas present for people hard of hearing, and this one, written that glorious day when I became the relieved owner of my state of the art, blue tooth hearing aids. It was the day I realised that the seatbelt makes a noise when you pull it across your chest, that footsteps are audible and that when a car sounds terrifyingly close, it's probably happily zooming down an adjacent street, you've just got used to the level of engine sound which sends the message to your brain not to attempt to cross that road if you want to reach the other side.

I've also spoken about the glorious age of hearing technology in which we live and how I should be reprimanded when I moan about the negative impact of phones on our lives because, for me, the good side to the little beauties: messaging, emailing, social media and not least, bitmojis, as recently introduced to me by my eldest, far outweighs the negative effect they have on sociability and community. 

Who needs to hear when
you've got this up your sleeve?

Nonetheless, I can't pretend I am always upbeat about my lack of hearing. Being unable to participate in conversations when the environment is too much even for my amazing aids, or when, horror of horrors, they break (they are very tiny and packed with very clever technology so alas, they do need a little tlc fairly regularly) or somebody goes from whisper to full-on shout, accompanied by pained expression, with no warning of the escalation to come, so I just want to slink away, and when I'm struggling to work - then it gets me down.

Enter: a lipreading course.

Finally, after nine months on the waiting list, my first class was today. I was ridiculously excited about the life-changing, or at least, life-improving, potential for this. But I was also nervous. The stakes were high. I'd been told the art of lipreading is tricky and at the very least, I'd need to dedicate a year to this new skill, probably more. I was, and am, prepared for that. If it works it will be hours enormously well spent. But with such high hopes, I knew I'd be disappointed crushed if ten minutes in I had that sinking feeling that this might not be the miracle I'd hoped it could be. I'd also missed the first week of the course due to holiday and if I've got to be a newbie, I'd rather be a newbie amongst newbies.

So, after following Maps on foot to a street I already know but 'just to be sure' (I never learn), I made only two wrong turns and was still outside the classroom ten minutes early. Ten minutes early for me, is half an hour in punctual people's worlds. I was quite proud of myself; the extra ten minutes would allow time for me to meet the teacher, make payment and apologise in person for missing the first week. Not so, my class is full of punctual people. Only two students arrived after me and one of those had been stuck on a five mile stretch of the A1 for two hours. No matter, everybody smiled kindly, the teacher welcomed me several times and I settled myself in, making my first mistake before the lesson had officially started, by answering the teacher whilst rummaging in my bag. You'd think I'd know better. She asked the question again, and I realised the teacher's hearing was even worse than mine.

Quickly, I began to realise that I'd entered a meeting room unlike any other I'd ever been in. Everybody waits to speak; no two people speak at one time. If somebody doesn't hear, their neighbour softly taps them on the arm and repeats it to them, and everybody is quiet while they do. Nobody worries about saying 'pardon' – none of the 'two pardon lives' here, where instead of the third 'pardon' it's preferable to simply nod or shake the head (a scrutiny of the speaker's facial expression is a fairly reliable guide to which way to go), allowing the two or more of you to move smoothly away from the troublesomely awkward conversation – no, here, you can pardon all you like. No background radio, no noisy fans and the blinds, crucially, were drawn. I joke that if I could carry out my life in the soundproofed booth of the audiologist's testing centre, I wouldn't need hearing aids, and this room came a very close second to that. I should add that once comfortable, I found myself discretely checking out everybody's hearing aids – which is tricky as they're so tiny these days – so, let it never be said that I don't know how to party.

On with the lesson and we talked about barriers to effective lipreading and how to get around them, practised comprehension of a passage about the history of London's coffee houses with the teacher soundlessly mouthing each short sentence – I understood enough to know that it wasn't Starbucks who started it all - and practised the number six (it's the hardest to spot) as well as the 'ff' sound.

In short, in no particular order, this is what I learnt:

• If I really concentrate, focus, clear my mind of the other rubbish, I can already understand a fair bit.
• Ask your friends if they'll kindly let you sit with your back to the window in a restaurant so that you don’t have to wrestle with the light casting shadows over their faces.
• 'Coffee' is easily mixed up with toffee, fluffy, muffly, wavy, banoffee, lovely and jiffy – but surprisingly not so much in context – which is comforting to know.
• 'Coffee' looks very different to 'tea' and so you won't end up with the wrong drink, even if you can't catch who's paying.
• Our teacher developed almost total deafness over the course of twenty years and communicated well through lipreading, until she had a cochlear implant a few years ago. It's wonderful to know she could manage but lipreading doesn't help you hear the birds or music, does it? This is one of those occasions where you have to love technology.
• The first coffee houses grew up in London in the 1600s and by the 18^th century, there were over 3,000 of them.
• If you feel able, ask the person with whom you're speaking to remove sunglasses, a hat, hair over the eyes, perhaps their hand in front of their face, as these all affect your ability to lip read.
• Charles 2^nd didn’t like coffee houses because politicians gave away all their secrets chatting in them.
• The art of understanding the spoken word through reading lips is written, 'lipreading' as opposed to, 'lip reading'.
• Artificial light is better for lipreading than natural light.
• Women didn't like coffee houses because the, 'new-fangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called "coffee" had transformed their industrious, virile men into unfruitful, babbling layabouts who idled away their time in coffee houses', or so said the Women's Petition in 1674. It made no difference and yes, that section was written down for us. Try me again in a couple of years on that one.
• Certain people are easier to lipread than others.
• I am by far the worst in the class. This is good because the others have been coming for months if not years and thus proof that it is possible to learn this stuff.
• If you've been all-consumed with getting out of the door on time for your class and have thus forgotten about breakfast, none of the other students, nor the teacher, will hear your stomach rumbling and crashing around. 

So, did I enjoy my first class? Certainly. Will I be going back? Absolutely. Will I develop the skill to read what people are saying on the other side of the room?

Well, that would be telling, wouldn't it…??

Chatty Monday

Monday this week was Very Chatty. After my third un-instigated conversation with strangers, I decided to close my notebook and embrace it. This was clearly not a day for productivity but for conversation.

My first memorable encounter was in the waiting room for the audiologist with a man, a good few years my senior, who clearly had better hearing than mine as we managed an entire conversation without so much as a whiff of a 'pardon' from his side, even though his hearing aids lay broken in their box. He told me one of those horror stories about call centres on the other side of the world trying to repair a phone line in his living room. While speaking to the engineer who'd finally arrived a month after the relatively well-hearing man's first request and was testing the line, he took a call from a man wishing to plan his funeral. 'I'm really excited about this one," he said to the engineer, who gave him a slightly disapproving look, unaware that he was an undertaker. I made a mental note that I'd be happy for this man to carry my coffin when the time came. He had one of those chuckles which made him bob up and down and cheeks which pulled themselves up into gobstopper balls when he laughed.

Next came a lady in her sixties who was comforted to see someone in our hearing aid party who was even younger than she was. Hearing centres have their upside. They, and the cancer ward, are the only place where I ever feel, and indeed am ever described as, young. We chatted about our first hearing aid encounters and the relief of suddenly being able to hear whole sentences instead of every first, fifth and eighth word and how it had been the rustle of a plastic carrier bag which had made her rush her hands to her ears when she first installed her hearing aids. For me it was my footsteps. It took me two days to stop tiptoe-ing.

A few words with the stand-in audiologist and I was compelled to ask where he was from. 'Morpeth,' he declared, which is twenty miles from where I was brought up in Wylam. We exchanged chat on the beauty of Northumberland and how Yorkshire was a wonderful county too. But I spent the rest of the appointment with a firm hold on my replacement Nottinghamshire accent so that he wouldn't think I was taking the mickey out of his lilting vowels. Anyone who's ever changed their accent – mine principally because the scariest girl in my new class of eleven year olds told me she'd 'nut me' if I called her 'man' one more time – will know what I mean.

It was now two hours since I'd left my study. I had my notebook with me and an empty stomach so I sought out the nearest large, oh so British department store which can be found on most high streets and settled myself down with a voucher-bought coffee and scone.

'Excuse me,' said a well-dressed lady, with roll-up curls you'd like to poke your finger through and bright pink lips to match her scarf, 'didn't you have a little boy with you when you came in?' Now, I do spend half of most days in the land of the fairies and have bashed my head so frequently on open cupboard doors that I've put a conservation order out on my brain cells, but I think that even I would remember whether I had a small son (I don't) and that one of us was missing when we sat down. This led us onto teenagers (of which I do recall I have two), the generous free hot drink voucher scheme and how this lively lady was 81 and her equally adorable young friend, a trifling 76. The friends had met on a coach tour three years ago when they were both recently bereaved and were quick to tell me that the passing of their husbands was the end of any relationship with men. 'I don't want to meet a man,' the 81 year old said, 'why would I want to do that? He'd be old!' I learnt that she was a 'bit of a spender'. Today she looking for some red knee length boots and April was a great time for bargains. Currently, she'd been unsuccessful; they were all too wide for her calves. We agreed this rendered them more like wellies and wondered for whom, exactly, knee length boots were designed to fit as her (slim) friend couldn't even get them over her ankles.

Then they told me the secret of eternal youth and happiness: get out of the house.

Back on the train, I finally started writing. I was supposed to be editing but instead penned this post as I'd come over all grateful; happy to be alive. I hadn’t done the work I’d planned but decided it's a mistake not to grab life when it’s lifting our spirits. The women of-a-certain-age- reminded me of my Gran before she died at the age of 92, weakened physically by Stroke but still sparkling with joie de vivre.

I've always believed that the spirits of those close to us watch over. It isn't a particularly religious feeling, nor indeed scientific - they never see us doing anything embarrassing or hear us saying anything odd, which is helpful because in my case they'd be rolling their eyes and shaking their heads so much they'd wobble themselves out of the sky - but I do believe in ghosts. Not the white sheet variety but the Good Samaritan kind who hold your hand sometimes.

I like to think that my Gran had a smile as she watched Chatty Monday and that she’d be relieved to see that exchanging tales and giggles with strangers was still one of life's simple pleasures – when we manage to leave technology in our bags, of course.