„Don’t Talk To Me From The Next Bloody Room!“ (Part one of two)

Picture it, Sicily, 1921…not a Golden Girls fan? Ok, skip the joke!

No seriously, picture the scene: It’s 1977 and I’m an 11 year old on my first school trip abroad. We’re in Amsterdam. I’m standing at the back of the group and our teacher is telling us about the arrangements for the next day. Strange, I can’t hear him properly. I grab my friend and pull her to the front. Ah, that’s better.

The week progresses and each time the teacher gathers us together, I stand just a few feet away so I can hear him. I think no more of it.

Back at school, and much to the disgruntlement of my best friend, I move to the front row of the class, still not really thinking anything of it and certainly not considering it a problem. I can hear my friends, my parents – even though I sometimes wish I couldn’t – and the TV at home is loud anyway, because my dad needs it that loud…

Yes, I know, I know, I should put two and two together at this point, but I’m 11 years old and I just don’t, ok!

Things continue pretty much in this vein until I’m 14 and my form teacher hands me a letter for my parents. They’ve organised a hearing test for me with a specialist who happens to live a few doors away from my home. I know him and his wife because I deliver their morning newspaper seven days a week. They are kindly folk who always tip well at Christmas and say good morning and thank you when they see me. To be knocking on the door I usually push a newspaper through is weird, but he waves me in, and is friendly and relaxed as he explains what we’re going to do and why. I’m there for an hour or more as he performs one test after the other. Only when it’s all over does he drop the bombshell that I have a major problem and that I’ve had it since birth!

What? How can that be? How can I have only noticed it on that school trip three years earlier? Wouldn’t my parents have noticed it if I’d had it all my life, or my teachers? Why now? It doesn’t make any sense.

He recommends aids for both ears which I turn down flat. No way! I’m managing ok sitting in the front row at school and nobody can fault my grades. I can still hear what I need to hear and the jokes my family makes about my selective hearing are just jokes. Aren't they?

I pass my A levels, have friends and a steady boyfriend and all is well. So I think.

Instead of going to university as my father wants, I opt instead to train as a psychiatric nurse. My first year is great, life on the wards is loud enough for me to hear and when something or someone is too quiet, I simply adopt my fallback position of moving closer. I will later discover that my peers found the wards deafening in the extreme and that everyone noticed I didn’t hear well.

Things come to a head when one ward sister gives me a terrible report, stating I am ignorant and don’t listen. I’m absolutely mortified! The school of nursing tutors step in and my unwillingness to listen is, once again, discovered to be a hearing problem.

So I go and get aids, right? No, I’m not ready.

Sigh!

Fast forward 10 whole years and I’m working as a recruitment consultant in the construction industry. Lots of conversations in this environment are loud. I’m fine!

Until a colleague pulls me aside and informs me that they are loud just for me.

Shit!

So, I go from one consultation to another, listening to various doctors and specialists telling me they are amazed I have functioned in the world thus far.

And then I get to thinking, to wondering – have I actually functioned or have I merely been ultra fortunate to be part of a family that speaks loudly for my dad and then part of that loud hospital environment where my problem went largely unnoticed? Am I really that bad? I speak to friends, to family, to colleagues. Yes, I am. They’ve enabled me for years and are tired of it.

Oh my God!

I get aids, they don’t help my hearing but they do make me feel I’m losing my mind. Noise, just indiscriminate noise with no improvement in my understanding of normal life and normal conversations.

I get new aids, the best money can buy they assure me. They don’t help and by this time I am out of denial and facing reality. I cannot bloody hear so much of what is going on around me. I am partially deaf – to what extent I do not know – and struggling with everyday communication.

One day, frustrated with people’s insistence on talking to me from the next damn room, I make an appointment with a different audiologist. My friend goes with me. The consultation is an eye-opener.

The audiologist, a strange-looking chap, who could be Lurch’s smaller, skinnier little brother, does his tests and then has my friend do a different kind of test. He turns on the radio and asks her at what level she can hear it without having to concentrate. From there, he turns the volume lower and lower until she can hear that someone is speaking but cannot make out the words. She stops him at that point.

That, he says, is her everyday life.

I break down and cry as she sits beside me, stunned by the reality of my problem.