I should not have decided to go ahead and host our biweekly board gaming night so soon after this hearing loss happened to me. While I love my friends and I was happy to see them, it was a little bit too much for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can’t adequately describe how horrendous my hearing situation is right now. In a quiet setting, it’s bearable; there’s some tinnitus (a low, constant humming sound) but that’s basically white noise. With my hearing aid in, I can hear many of the normal background sounds — water running, Ray puttering around, the microwave beeping, horns honking, the keys on our keyboards clicking — and none of those are a problem. (Without the hearing aid…well, I hear a lot less, though not nothing.) I can have a conversation with Ray as long as he’s either very close to my ear or wearing the microphone that streams directly into my hearing aid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tonight was the first time I’ve been in a noisy setting since this happened. I have the microphone, so I was hoping that would help, and it did — as long as there wasn’t too much other noise in the room…which was almost never, since we had something like 10-12 people over. I put the microphone in Surround mode in the middle of the gaming table so I could hear everyone, but the result was both way too loud and still incomprehensible — not unlike being at a concert where the volume is so loud that all the sound is distorted. It was like listening to a dozen people through a badly-tuned, loud CB radio. It was maddening and exhausting and if this is my new normal, I am going to have to avoid social gatherings in the future. Every time someone laughed or made a loud exclamation during our game, I thought my head was going to explode…but if I turned the volume down, I couldn’t understand a word. And if someone was trying to talk to me, if there was even one other person talking nearby, I could not understand a word, even if they were using the microphone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I will discuss all this with the doctor and audiologist on Monday, but I have no idea if there’s anything that can be done. I am terrified that this is how I’m going to have to live from now on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I feel like I should rename this blog, considering how much it’s derailed from the original topic, but I don’t know what else to call it. There will<\/em> be more about my cochlear implant here once it’s activated, but for right now the all-consuming thing is this new and unexpected hearing loss episode that has me reeling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I should not have decided to go ahead and host our biweekly board gaming night so soon after this hearing loss happened to me. While I love my friends and I was happy to see them, it was a little bit too much for me. I can’t adequately describe how horrendous my hearing situation is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}