Hearing

So I'm actually partially deaf. It used to be more of an issue for me, but as I've gotten older I have become much more proficient at figuring out what people are actually saying. For instance if I hear one of my friends say "And then my mom starting running after the squirrel!" based on experience, I just generally assume they actually said "dog" instead of "mom."  As you can see, my mis-hearings actually make some stories more interesting, so it's not always a problem. I mean what is more fun to think about, a dog running after a squirrel, or your friend's mom? I think the choice is clear. 

As a child I had to sit through a ton of extremely tedious and time-consuming hearing tests. Basically what happens is they put you in this tiny white room that has a chair and baby toys in it. The room is soundproof so the walls are about a foot thick and the door kind of works like an air-lock type thing. In other words, it's freaking creepy. I often thought about how if a bomb went off right outside the building, I would have no idea. I can't describe why, but I found this fact to be extremely unnerving. The very building could be burning down and I would be stuck in a room raising my hand when I hear a beep.

So they leave you in this room by yourself while the person running the test goes into an adjacent room that you can see in through by a window. After about a half an hour of telling whether or not I could hear certain tones in beeps, my head starts ringing. I start hearing beeps even when the test isn't running. Every time I remember trying to tell the person running the test that I wasn't sure if I was hearing beeps anymore because my head was ringing so much. They would always tell me "okay, well there is only a few more," even though the test would go on for another 10 minutes.

After the torture of the beeps, I had to sit through another overly long test where I would repeat words back to a recording. An extremely masculine voice would say something like "dog" and I would have to say "dog." I have no idea how many words I had to say back, but it felt like a hundred. I got so bored during this test one time I started to count the holes in the wall. Repeating words back to a person doesn't require much cognitive effort. But wait, there's more! After this recording was done, they put headphones on my head that had what they called "background noise" playing. I would describe it as a SHshshshSHSHSHSHshshshshsSHSh type of noise. Then I got to repeat back another set of different words! At this point I was so bored I started to make a story in my head out of the words I was hearing. For instance:

"Through"

Our car went through the tunnel.

"Pass"

We also passed by a cow.

"Borrow"

We asked the farmer if we could borrow the cow for a while. He said no.

"Animal"

It was a shame, cows are such cool animals!

The stories generally got weirder as the test went on because I had to include many more seemingly unrelated things into it. Luckily I was a very imaginative child and this wasn't too much of an issue.

On my ipod today: "Better Man" by Pearl Jam. It's another one of those songs that has slightly depressing lyrics with an uplifting melody, but it still just works.