Persistent Acts of Kindness

‘At least we won’t forget it!’

‘Imagine the stories for our grandchildren!’

You know, I love the human spirit in these situations, searching for the humour and positive. In truth – and please stay with me as I gloss over the fact that 2021 hasn’t exactly begun to a deluge of parties and hugs and burning of masks – 2020 will be the year we remember for all the wrong many of the wrong reasons.

There are heaps of us lucky enough (and this isn’t to forget those who’ve been hit so terribly hard) to have a list of things that have been an ‘improvement’ on pre-Covid life or, if that’s stretching it too far, a decent alternative.

One of the positives I’ve heard talked about far and wide is the receipt of random acts of kindness, those people with enormous hearts, ‘paying it forward’. It's that wonderful gesture from which the giver receives nothing concrete – the fabulous mood lifting power of a sense of wholesome well-being notwithstanding.

This happened to me totally unexpectedly at the end of last year.

My increasingly poor hearing has become more of an issue in recent years which you may have noticed in my increasing blog posts on this theme. I am also incredibly lucky. My type of hearing loss responds to hearing aids and mine are so good, that I can almost forget my hearing is so poor.

Until that is, I take them out.

An occasion where I am reminded that I am very hard of hearing is when I need to absolutely, and categorically, wake up. Combine the poor hearing with being an incredibly deep sleeper, and a broke-the-mould night owl (my life’s mission is addressing this: more about that here) and it presents a problem when I have an early flight, class, appointment, or even simply an over-spilling to-do list.

Luckily, my lark of a husband can be relied upon to shake me awake at any point post 6am. Earlier? Not a problem. If he’s not awake already, this alarm radio thing apparently clicks on to some dreary news channel and does the job. Personally, I can’t imagine a worse way to wake from peaceful slumbers, but that’s ok, because I can’t hear it anyway.  I also can’t hear any clock. No, not the analogue ones with the bells either – I’ve tried them all. I certainly can’t hear my phone. That long list of tones and chimes you can set to bring you back from Slumberdom? I’ve tested each and every one without aids. At the absolute best, providing the volume is on max, there is the odd sound I can register as a sort of faint rattle.

That ain’t gonna work.

The closest I’d come to success was setting my Garmin watch to shake me awake and certainly, in a light sleep, I will notice my wrist being pummelled by my watch. But I’m oblivious in a deep sleep and thus this method is also not reliable for me.  

Hence the problem, which is not an unusual one: if I can’t rely on something to wake me up when my human alarm clock isn’t available, I have Early Flight Syndrome every time. I wake several times in a panic, only to see the hands of the clock having inched forward since the last eruption into Wakedom. Off I return to my slumbers, only to repeat the process every half hour or so.

So, I decided to investigate. I posted on Facebook about this dilemma. Did anybody know of any alarm capable of waking this normally deep sleeping, poor hearer? So many people took the time to reply, often sending me links to various potential solutions, and I’d like to thank them first of all for that. You know we love to diss us humans but most people really are so very kind and helpful and that came through loud and clear – excuse the pun - in response to my slightly off the wall question.

Alas, many of the suggestions I’d already tried to no avail, but something piqued my interest. Following a very amusing comment by one friend who, it would appear, had been bi-passed when the cycadean rhythms were being handed out, and any of the other stuff that wakes a person, I looked into the Wake ’n’ Shake Dynamite (!) 

This alarm clock booms out at a rude 95 decibels. The pneumatic drill is 120 decibels. A 110-decibel sound is the loudest an audiologist will play when testing your hearing (and only then if it's very poor). If you need a sound to be louder than 90 decibels for it to register, your hearing, at least in relation to that particular tone, is classed as profoundly deaf. I have a few sounds that I can hear at 95 decibels. But I wasn’t sure whether I had enough to hear the alarm alone.

There’s more. The clock has a funny little paddle attached which you stick under your pillow - it’s soft, no Princess and the Pea here - and that, well, as my amusing non-sleeping, incredibly helpful friend assured, ‘makes the earth move’. Excellent. And then, just so you can tick all boxes, there’s also a strobe light to join in the party.

This could be life changing. It's not cheap*, around the £40 mark when I was looking. But it was certainly going on my Christmas List.  

Enter a fellow writer who I can’t profess to know very well at all. We are Facebook writing friends but have never met. A message popped up saying that this writer had tested this alarm clock for her blog and that if I could make use of it, it was mine. She wanted no money and wouldn’t even let me pay the postage.

Not only was I ridiculously excited to have potentially found the answer to my Early Flight Syndrome but I was also overcome with the kindness of people: how the ugliness of human nature often makes it to the fore of the news, and is repeated ad infinitum over the day, but there are random acts of kindness happening all day, every day, all over the world.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened to me in lockdown. Eleanor, I’m looking at you!

2020? The horrors are well documented and ongoing. They can’t be ignored, and they will be on the list to tell the grandchildren.

But the positive? Alongside the innate human ability to find a smattering of the good, positive and even humorous in a situation? The kindness of strangers! The love and power of community! This also needs to be sung from the rooftops.

Thank you, everyone. And may 2021 bring us more positives than negatives to tell the next generation.

Oh, The Wake ’n’ Shake! Does is work? 

Let’s just say: the earth moves.

 

*The RNID (recently returned to their original name after ten years as Action on Hearing Loss) provides help in purchasing technology to assist with hearing loss. Find out more, here.

In non-COVID-19 times (temporarily closed), The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) lend this type of technology out for your children to try before you buy.

The Wake ‘n’ Shake Dynamite Alarm is widely available. This links you to its listing in the RNID online shop

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…??