Sound Shadow

I needed hearing aids, and because I needed them, I didn’t want them.

“According to this chart your loss is considered moderate.”

“But it goes away,” I said, convinced this expert wouldn’t believe me. “Sometimes I can hear just fine.”

“Okay, yes, I’m seeing that here too. Wow, you test all over the chart.”

I liked Melinda — the first audiologist I’d met in my 35 years on earth — but I’d been tricked into meeting her. Specialists and pharmacists and support staff were blurring together. because for months I’d been visiting doctors of all kinds — neurologists, otologists — to try to piece together what was going wrong with my head, why my hearing cut out and returned, and why my ears would suddenly fill with startling noises, hisses and thrums that made it impossible for me to teach my classes, impossible to navigate the world. Sometimes the room tilted away and I felt like I was falling. Sometimes my hearing and balance came back, remaining stable for days. But they were tense and uncertain days, because I knew they would not last.

“I think I do have something that can help you,” a new phy­sician in Denver had told me, after ten minutes of pleading and bitching on my part. With a glint in his eye, he packaged me off to Melinda’s examination room without explaining who she was. To my alarm, Melinda wasn’t a diagnostician after all. An audi­ologist was someone who prescribed machines you had to buy. They didn’t cure you, just made things louder.

“You can choose from in-the-ear and behind-the-ear models. Behind-the-ears are going to offer more options.”

“What would that cost me?”

She paused.

“There’s a variety of price ranges. So there are op­tions. For someone with fluctuating loss like yours — the more expensive models, again — I’m thinking about a six- thousand- dollar pair from Widex that might be able to offer more flexibility