On losing my hearing (#1418)

Topics/tags: Autobiographical

I’ve been thinking a lot about my hearing of late. More precisely, I’ve been thinking a lot about my loss of hearing. My hearing loss isn’t new; I’m pretty sure that I started noticing the issue more than a decade ago [1], and I’ve been wearing hearing aids for over six years. It’s also not necessarily clear that I’m continuing to lose my hearing; my last hearing test results look remarkably similar to my results from two or three years ago. Nonetheless, hearing loss remains an obvious and disruptive issue in my life.

I initially noticed my hearing loss in a variety of situations. I couldn’t converse with students and parents in the prospective student days events that they used to hold in JRC 101 [2]. I couldn’t hear many students, particularly female students, at the back of the classroom [3]. Many times, I had difficulty understanding public speakers. And, worst of all, I often struggled to hear Michelle [4].

It’s clear that there’s a strong physical component to my hearing loss; that’s what the tests suggest. Nonetheless, I think more is going on than physical changes. My hearing aids are supposed to restore my hearing to normal, or at least close to normal. When they test my hearing with the hearing aids in, I hear about as well as someone who doesn’t need hearing aids, or so they tell me. Yet I still find myself in many situations in which the people around me seem to be able to understand someone and I cannot. I can hear that they’ve said something, but I can’t tell what it was. I think my brain is also not processing spoken language as well as it used to. Can you test that? Is it worth testing it? I don’t know.

There are also other factors involved; the hearing aids may amplify some things that others can easily ignore. For example, when I’m teaching, the sound of the air handlers can make it much more difficult for me to understand what students are saying. They don’t seem to have as much trouble hearing each other, but they are also further from the handlers in the ceiling. On the other hand, they may not care as much about their failure to hear; there have certainly been times when I’ve asked a student near me to repeat what a student in the back of the class says, and their response is I don’t know or I couldn’t really hear.

Today, I had difficulty hearing a speaker in a workshop because I was getting strange feedback in my hearing aids. I changed the wax guard, which often makes things better, and the feedback got worse. I changed some settings. That helped. However, the indicator beeps I got while changing the settings meant that I couldn’t hear what she said when I was trying to get them working. It was frustrating. It’s not an infrequent frustration [4]. It didn’t help that the speaker was relatively soft-spoken.

What about those original frustrations? Let’s see. I can’t stand being in a crowd; even with the crowd setting, the hearing aids amplify in a different way than my ears used to, and I’m overwhelmed by noise. It’s particularly bad in rooms that reflect sound, such as the Faculty/Staff lounge in the building formerly known as Carnegie [5]. I still struggle to hear students in the back of the room. However, I’m more comfortable asking the people in the front of the room to repeat what those students said. I accept my disability and ask those around me to accommodate as best they can.

On a much more positive note, our T-Coil system generally means that I can hear speakers much better. It’s astounding how much of a difference it makes when we have speakers use the T-Coil system in JRC-101 and, on occasion, other rooms. Of course, Grinnell made some strange choices about our T-Coil systems, so I have to be careful about where I sit in the HSSC Lecture Hall, and I’ve had mixed luck with the Kernel [6], especially when our audio system designers decided it would make sense to have the ceiling mics always on. I also don’t understand why they set up sections of both those rooms in which the T-Coil is inactive (the front of the lecture hall and the back of the Kernel). Sometimes I wonder about the consultants we hire.

I suppose I don’t have to worry about not hearing Michelle anymore. But for a few years, the hearing aids achieved this essential goal; I could hear Michelle, and I generally didn’t keep having to ask What? [7]

When I first got the hearing aids, I learned about other things I was missing. For example, one of the first things I asked Michelle was, When did the birds come back to town? That is, I hadn’t been hearing bird calls, and I’d assumed that our bird population had moved (flown?) away. I can also hear more odd sounds in the house, such as when the toilet doesn’t stop flushing. I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing.

As I said, frustrations remain. I’ve mentioned a few. What’s most frustrating is that I can’t predict when or what I won’t be able to hear. I’ve been at conferences in which I hear fine at most talks, then suddenly I’m at a talk in which I can’t understand the speakers at all, even with amplification. I’ve tried asking people around me, including people who work in disability studies, and not only are they able to hear, but they can’t identify anything strange about the sound. I’m also irritated that I have more difficulty hearing—or at least understanding—people with accents. I hate feeling like an ignorant American.

I also have a tendency to lose my hearing aids. It’s not that I put them down and walk away; it’s that they fall out of my ears, perhaps when I take off my glasses, perhaps because they get caught in my long and curly [8] hair. I try to check for them with some regularity [9], but they still disappear. I’m not sure how I can do better. There’s a free replacement for lost aids policy, but it has limitations.

In spite of these frustrations, I’m fortunate. I can still hear a lot with the aids (and even without them). I can afford hearing aids [10]. And I have learned an important thing: It’s okay to tell people that I have hearing loss and ask them to speak louder or repeat themselves.

Postscript: I’ve heard that some of our hard-of-hearing students are reluctant to speak up about inadequate sound in classrooms. I hope those students will follow my lead and ask for appropriate accommodations.

Postscript: Apologies for the maudlin Michelle mentions in this musing.

[1] Michelle would know. Unfortunately, she’s not around to tell me.

[2] Do we still hold those events? I don’t recall the department being asked to send volunteers of late. Or perhaps I’ve just ignored any invitations because my hearing loss makes them difficult.

[3] Like many people, I experience hearing loss primarily at the upper end of the audio spectrum.

[4] Yeah, yeah. The sentence has a double negative. However, I prefer its rhythm to It’s a frequent frustration, even though the latter alliterates.

[5] Perhaps it’s still known as Carnegie. If not, it’s HSSC C.

[6] Also known as the HSSC Multipurpose Room.

[7] Admittedly, there were times I asked because I wasn’t really listening.

[8] and tangled.

[9] If you see me rubbing the tops of my ears, that’s me checking for the hearing aids. Or maybe it’s me adjusting the hearing aids. Or my ears itch. Something like that.

[10] Grinnell’s latest medical plan covers the costs of my hearing aids as long as I don’t lose them too often.

Version 1.0 of 2026-08-04.