My Hearing Journey #2

Hearing loss is measured in a spectrum among four categories.

Profound

Severe

Moderate

Mild

My hearing hovers towards the top part of the Severe spectrum.

At 50 years old, I’d just gone to an audiologist and been informed that I was not a little hard of hearing — I was severely deaf. In fact, I was in the upper spectrum of severely deaf!

No, no, I thought, that can’t be right. I knew I was a little hard of hearing, but it’s not like I had a hearing impairment. I hear sounds. The 600+ songs on my MP3 player attest to the fact that I can hear.

“You have a discrimination level of about 20%,” Dr. Carson said. “That means you don’t have the clarity necessary to understand speech. So even when things are loud enough for you, they aren’t clear enough. You’re a champion lip reader though! You were probably born with this hearing loss. Didn’t your parents ever notice this when you were a child?”

Well….I didn’t have those kinds of parents. I don’t talk about it, but I grew up in a family of alcoholics and drug addicts. My mother was an angry, unpleasant woman who took her frustrations out of her kids, physically and verbally. Both my father and later, my step-father, were also alcoholics who couldn’t hold down jobs.

In Missouri, where I grew up, the term for my parents was white-trash-trouble-makers (and yes, that’s one word.) Their time and attention were invested in drinking and scoring drugs; and fighting with each other, writing bad checks, doing jail time, bar fights, dodging eviction notices and arrest warrants. My mother despised her three children so much that she kept us for the welfare stamps she could collect because of us. (This was proven when we became teenagers — my mother tossed each of her children out of the house when we turned 16 years old.) Maybe in between drinks my parents noticed my hearing problem….I was told plenty of times to pay attention.

“Didn’t you ever have your hearing tested while you were in school? Didn’t any of your teachers notice?” Dr. Carson asked. Well…I remember a hearing test once; raise your hand when you heard the beep. But white-trash-trouble-makers move a lot, and I attended dozens (plural) of schools over the years. Sometimes, I attended a school for days before my parents moved again. And when I showed up at the new school I was hungry, unwashed, wearing second-hand rags and covered in bruises, so I imagine it was easy to miss a small thing like a hearing problem.

Despite that, I performed fairly well in school. When I didn’t, what I heard from my teachers was, “Kay, you’re so smart, but….” But I didn’t pay attention, or I didn’t follow directions, or I had my head in the clouds. And all that was very true. I wasn’t paying attention; I was hungry, I was afraid, I was injured. I’d been up all night listening to my parents fight, my step-father was sexually molesting me, or I was living in a house with no electricity, or in the family station wagon, and I was worried about how I was going to afford hot dogs so my two younger brothers could eat on the weekend. My refuge was my fantasy world. I read books by the gross, escaped into other worlds and later, I wrote, and created my own worlds. Dr. Carson’s next question pulled me away from a past I didn’t often think about.

“Did you ever think to have your hearing tested as an adult?” Dr. Carson asked. Well…no. I was homeless when I was 16 years old — back then it was about survival. In my 20’s I was focused on accumulating furniture, managing adulthood and trying to figure out how to be something besides a white-trash trouble-maker.

My 30’s were wasted on pretending. Pretending my awful childhood was behind me, pretending that I was a ‘normal’ person, and later, pretending that I wasn’t being overrun by the Major Depression and Anxiety Disorder that comes when you pretend too much.

During that time, I was overwhelmed by anxiety attacks, and so weighted down with depression that death seemed the only solution. I saw lots of doctors during those years. But their focus was on keeping me alive, and my hearing never worked its way into the conversation.