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

I leave the audiology department that day with three things I didn’t have before:

• An audiologist I truly believe will do his best to treat me as an individual. I love how he explained my rather unusual audiogram to me, which explains why I can hear birds singing but not people’s voices. Talk about a lightbulb moment!

• New hope for getting an aid that might finally help my hearing instead of making me feel I am losing my mind. I now understand why ‘normal’ aids don’t help me.

• Best of all, I’m leaving with a friend who has, I hope, a far better understanding of what it means to live this funny half-life, watching, concentrating and playing a never-ending game of fill-in-the-blanks, which I’ve become bloody good at, but which is as exhausting as dealing with the frustration of those who repeat everything three times before giving up. Even if the new aids are not much good for me, having friends around who understand what it takes to communicate with me effectively, is worth gold.

“I never knew,” she whispers as we sit back in the car. “I’m sorry, I never knew.”

With a smile, I reassure her. How can I be mad at anyone for not taking my problem seriously when I myself denied it for so very many years?

Two weeks later I’m back and the audiologist puts his cards on the table. Hearing aids are not yet advanced enough to help me in the area I need it most – the middle frequency where voices are found and where my hearing ability is in the severe hearing loss range – whilst at the same time increasing the low frequencies but leaving the high frequencies almost untouched. He’ll do his best, but what I really need is some years down the line yet. There are not many people, he tells me, with this particular problem.

I leave with a smile. The aids are better than I’ve had previously and I now understand why certain sounds are practically nonexistent and others I hear almost normally. Understanding is half the battle for me, it always has been.

Life goes on and to be honest not much changes. The aids are ok but not great and I can’t wear them for long periods. I use them for business meetings but not social meetups where sounds are unpredictable. Beeps and ringing phones hurt my ears, people talking together is just a rush and a jumble of confusion and the barman ringing his bell for last orders in the pub has me jumping out of my seat.

Slowly but surely I also realise I can’t do my job anymore. The phone has become an object of fear because it doesn’t play ball with my aids and without them I can’t hear the person on the other end. After one too many episodes of miscommunication, I hang up my hat.

It’s at this point, at almost 40 years of age, that I realise the best job for me is as a self-employed person in an environment I can control. I become a personal fitness trainer with one-to-one clients and for several years all is well.

And then, I move to Austria.

I speak German, I rationalise, so how much different can it be? Hahaha! Famous last bloody words!

The first time someone speaks to me in the dialect of this ski resort village I’ve buried myself in, I almost drop. What the hell did he just say?!

Thinking it was just him, I don’t worry too much about it and as I set up my bank account and meet my new landlady we all speak Hoch Deutsch, – the equivalent of Queen’s English – and everything is fine. I’m concentrating hard, but keeping up.

I set up my mountain biking holiday business and the first two years are great because my guests are in very small groups and all either from the UK or the US. There are plenty of humourous incidents relating to being a hard of hearing alpine bike guide with a poor sense of direction and a fear of cows, but I know these routes inside out and I ride at the back of the group with another guide up front so not much can go wrong.

Then comes the 2008/9 financial crisis and no one comes. I close down the business and try to get a job.

“It's not that you have a hearing problem or that you don’t speak the local dialect,” the job centre manager tells me, “but if I put them together I have no idea where I could send you.”

A friend who works in a pizzeria tells me they’re looking for help. I’m there, I have rent to pay! The stress that night is off the charts as I mishear one order after another and guests end up with an ‘Alex-surprise’, which some eat anyway and some send back to the kitchen. I’m fired. I can laugh about it now, but it was one of the worst evenings of my life!

Another friend who is a vet offers me a job in her surgery, but her clients are local and speak the dialect I can neither hear nor learn, it’s so very different from German. I hold out for a couple of months, but we both agree it’s not working.

I’m back where I started, I need to be self-employed.

I start teaching English, the one thing I can do better than anyone else here and where my students have to speak loudly and clearly and one at a time. Result! The fact that I need to stand beside each person’s desk as they speak, is by the by.

After class we all go out for a drink, but there are eight of them and because they’re now all together they fall back into speaking dialect. I can’t and don’t blame them, it’s what they know. Why should they speak Hoch Deutsch just because of me when I can’t speak to more than one person anyway?

The weeks and months go by and each week in class I’m the life and soul, we have a lot of fun and they’re learning so much too. After class I say almost nothing because I have no idea what’s going on around me. I sip my drink and observe. I hate it. I try to explain and they try to make it easier but it’s not. Eventually, the evenings stop, but the after-class drink is as important as the learning and without it, interest wanes. The teaching stops too. At least for groups. I begin teaching one to one, but it doesn’t pay much so I add in translation work and begin writing my first book.

And just like that, I’ve become isolated, which is so not like me. I love being around people and talking to them.

In retrospect, it was a mistake to move to an area like this where I’m already at a disadvantage because I’m not one of them. My hearing problem just makes things that much worse.

My new specialist is talking about a cochlear implant but he and his colleagues have underlined the risk of my already very loud tinnitus becoming considerably worse if I go that route.

Will I take the risk or wait for a new aid he’s also excited about?

I don’t know.

I don’t want to give you the impression that it’s all bad. It’s not. I don’t have to listen to gossip, I can sleep in any hotel room without being disturbed by what’s going on outside and I don’t hear dripping taps or the humming of machinery or cars passing by.

I have a few friends who make the effort to ensure I hear them and my neighbours all shout and wave good morning.

It’s just a little lonely. You know?