What? Beans in your ears?

My Mommy told me “Don’t put beans in your ears, beans in your ears.”

Remember that song?

It comes to mind every time I slip my hearing-aid domes into an ear canal. It feels unnatural. You’re not supposed to put cotton swabs, pencils or beans in your ears. You might break your ear drum. It might get stuck in your ear and they’ll have to take you to the hospital and use a giant vacuum to suck it out. And your brains could be sucked out in the process.

And if you put a bean in your ear, it will get stuck in there, take root and you’ll have green beans growing from your ears by late summer.

Don’t put beans in your ears …

So here I am, sitting with two electronic beans in my ears. And I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.

I don’t like the tinny sound. I don’t like the feeling of fullness.

I don’t like the sounds I’ve been missing,
the dog licking,
shower dripping
keyboard clicking.

It’s all too loud.

For years I’ve tried to ignore my failing hearing. I first became aware of it when my spouse would tell me a smoke alarm was going off in the basement or the reel on my 16mm projector was making a squeaking sound. I didn’t hear it, so it didn’t exist.

Next came errors in reporting, especially at meetings ,where I would have to quote speakers in rooms with horrible acoustics. Sheepishly, I’d have to ask them to repeat themselves after the meeting, if I could track them down in time.

I noticed that the sound from the telephone receiver was much louder in my right ear than the left. In fact, when people spoke into my left ear, I just didn’t hear it. I even had a psychic tell me I had a bad left ear, and that was 20 some years ago.

It all goes back to 1976 or so, when I was bill collector for Sun Finance. Remember finance companies? Yes, I worked for one. And one evening as I was doing collections, I acquired a new disability. I was knocking on the door of a delinquent debtor, who happened to live in a block house down on the lakefront in Conneaut. The house had an enclosed block porch, and I was standing in that area when two misfits tossed a pack of firecrackers into the enclosed area.

The blast floored me. When I came too, I had incredible ringing in my ears, and no hearing.

I went home and figured it would go away in a couple of days. Slowly, the hearing did return, but never the ringing. Tinnitus, they call it. And the hearing, although recovered, was never the same.

Ruth, God bless that sweet lady’s heart, played along with my hearing loss when we were dating. She patiently repeated things and showed great empathy, even though she has great hearing. But I could not deny that something was seriously wrong, and that I was going to get myself in trouble by playing along like I knew what people were saying to me. Only in one-on-one conversations, with no background noise, could I understand the words. I just nodded and smiled, and I often wondered how many times I did that when the other person was trying to tell me that something gross was hanging on my face or that their mother had just passed away after a lingering illness of 42 years.

Years ago I saw an ENT doctor about the problem, and he suggested some super-expensive hearing aids to try to block the constant ringing and regain some of the high-frequency loss. The cost was around $12K. In case you are unfamiliar with how all this works, hearing aids are not covered by health insurance. They are smarter than that. So it was always out of the question.

Last month I decided to have my hearing checked again. The audiologist charted on a graph the frequencies that I could hear. It looked like the graph of the coming stock market crash when Donald Trump is replaced by a Democrat or Libertarian. The audiologist just shook her head and said “You ain’t hearing much, buddy.”

I can’t hear frequencies above 1 kHz. The left ear is especially bad. It might as well be dead. The audiologist told me that I’ve compensated all these years by using the right ear, but it’s on life support. But at least it can be helped with a hearing aid.

Armed with the results of my hearing test, I went shopping online for the dreaded hearing aids. I selected a pair from Audicus. Cost more than a full-frame Nikon DSLR.

I’ve had them for about three weeks now. The company is good to work with, but did I mention I don’t like the hearing aids?

Granted, I can now hear what the preacher says during the sermon, and I’m starting to realize that a lot of the stuff that I thought he said was OK, isn’t. Well, I may exaggerating on that.

And I’ve discovered that my little car is extremely noisy (suggestion: if you suffer from hearing loss, you can save money by purchasing a noisy, subcompact car). I recently wore my hearing aids while driving and was amazed at all the rattles and rumbles in that car. And I noticed for the first time since I purchased the car I could hear the turning signal clicking. I just figured it was some modern thing, that the turning signals no longer clicked. Then I realized why Ruth was always poking me to turn off the signal.

When her told her that I discovered my car was noisy, she said “I knew that.”

“You mean when we went on our first date? Was it noisy then?

“Yes.”

“And you continued to date me?”

“Yes.”

Now that’s love!

And that is why I will eventually get used to wearing these darn things, these beans in my ears. I want to hear to her voice, and I want to hear all of life, cacophony and music alike. I don’t want to end up like my mother, although I probably will, who had to be screamed at because she refused to wear her hearing aids, and who had to constantly turn to my father and ask for an interpretation of what I just said.

Hearing aids are expensive, they don’t sound anything like “natural hearing” and they are a pain to wear. They eat batteries like Christmas morning. You always worry about that silly retaining strand sticking out of your ear like an old man’s hair that hasn’t seen a razor since adolescence.

And it feels like there are beans in my ears.