Listen up!

It started with my husband answering what sounded like “mwwaah” in response to most questions. I didn’t know if it was “yes”, “no”, or “maybe” – or if he was just hedging his bets with a “mwwaah”... Now, that being the case, it could have occurred to me that Steve had not properly heard what I’d said and was winging it with his response. But instead it struck me that it was me, not him, who wasn’t hearing too well. Still, he is a serial mumbler – so I let it go for a while. And my other excuse was that I heard him least well when we were walking alongside a noisy road, or if I was in one part of our airy L shaped kitchen while Steve – a private chef – was in the other part, competing with the force 8 extraction and sizzling pans.  But then I noticed I couldn’t hear the radio that well when the Today programme woke me up. I particularly noticed it if I was straining to hear an interesting story - and it occurred to me that one ear was better than the other. Even then, though, it was easy to forget about it once I’d got up and on with my day. But there were other incidents – a friend whispering in my left ear, which I couldn’t hear, and increasing trouble hearing softly spoken people in noisy restaurants.

A number of my friends and colleagues seemed to have the same problem – all of us practically boasting, in fact, that we couldn’t hear a thing, and that our children complained we never listened to them.

But, when Hidden Hearing offered me a free hearing test last September, I thought I may as well take it up and find out what was going on. It may have been a blob of wax – but it turned out my left ear (which did indeed fail the hearing test) was squeaky clean inside. My local Hidden Hearing audiologist, Tom, later confirmed that the hairs lining the outer part of my cochlea had fallen flat and were no longer picking up sound as they should be. It is apparently unusual to have this kind of hearing loss at my age (yes, even at 52, I am TOO YOUNG!!) – and it’s also abnormal to experience the loss in one ear only... However my brother says he has the same thing (in his right ear), so I am not too concerned about that. As a child I had a lot of earache and always seemed to have cotton wool in one of my ears – so it’s possible that’s when the damage was done. The good news is that I now have a lovely, very discreet, little “listening device” and it has been as much of a boon as my reading glasses were. They helped the words leap off the page. My listening device helps them sound less muffled - even if it hasn't cured Steve's mumbling and there is still the occasional "mwwaah". 

See a video about my experience here.