Front Porch: Hearing aids turn up volume on happiness

My husband got hearing aids last week, and both of our lives have gotten better since.

It took Bruce awhile to get there. Like so many people, he learned how to adapt as he began having hearing deficits. There was lip-reading, figuring out what’s being said by the context of the conversation and just smiling and nodding while a discussion went on around him. There was having me fill in the gaps in what he heard when our son called from overseas. He got a headset for TV viewing. He recognized he was missing things, but since the loss was incremental and he got used to it in stages, it didn’t seem so bad.

Until it was. Until it became difficult to communicate on the phone with customers. Until he misunderstood too many important things. Until he attended a performance and couldn’t make out one word that was said. Until it became painful to eat in a restaurant and have the background noise cancel out conversation with friends at the table. Until he began not wanting to go certain places because it was too difficult not hearing. Until he realized I was no longer going to those same places because they had to do with things we did as a couple. Not only was he missing out, he realized, but I was, too.

Not that there wasn’t humor along the way. We were once watching a news item about the sandwich generation, about those middle-age people who are both raising a family and having to care for their aging parents. “What did they just say?” Bruce asked. I told him the comment had been that the sandwich generation is often faced with having to choose between their children and their parents.

He laughed out loud. “I thought they said that a choice would have to be made between their children and their ferrets. If it was me, I’d choose the ferrets.” I had to laugh, too.

We were in Seattle last month watching a play our son, Sam, had directed and choreographed. Bruce was enjoying the choreography, scenery and costuming, as most of the dialogue was just babble to him, while I was able to take it all in. He turned to whisper a comment to Sam, a “whisper” heard three rows in front of us. When you can’t hear well, you can’t judge your own volume properly either.

But eventually, it got less and less funny and more and more debilitating, more and more affecting the quality of his life. I hurt for him during the time leading up to finally making the decision to do something about this. It wasn’t a vanity thing for him, a denial that time is marching on or that he was as intact as when he was young. He’s not that kind of guy.

But he is the kind of guy who doesn’t like to make a fuss or be dependent on outside help. He’s the kind of guy you want on your Conestoga when you travel across the prairie; he can fix and do pretty near everything himself and takes pride in being self-reliant. He’s a just-walk-it-off kind of guy. He thought he could just get by, that he was tough enough to just roll with the diminishment.

Hearing loss isn’t a character flaw or the outcome of unhealthy living. With some exceptions, it’s mostly a matter of aging and/or genetics. It’s not that Bruce didn’t know that, but accepting it took some time. It wasn’t about being tough about it; it was about being smart about it.

So here we are. Bruce is hearing sounds he hasn’t heard in … well … it seems like forever. A day after he got his hearing aids he heard a kind of swooshing sound. It took him some time to figure out what it was – the sound of his pant legs rubbing against each other as he walked. He can now hear and participate in conversations in restaurants, and pick up what people are saying at nearby tables. His world is getting larger again, and I’m so happy for him that I could cry. And I have.

Truth be told, I’m happy for me, too. If his hearing loss had been irreversible, of course we’d deal with it, just as we’ve dealt with other issues that have come along that we couldn’t really fix. I don’t know anyone who has made it into the senior years without facing some trials for which there are no remedies or only inadequate ones.

But sometimes you can actually get back something you’ve lost. Don’t wait so long. You really don’t know how beautiful the world sounds until you can hear the singing again.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net. Previous columns are available at spokesman.com/columnists.