What?

It’s been a very strange few days. Sometime Sunday night, my ear decided to become enraged at me with an infection. My head has felt like a basketball since then. I lost hearing pretty much completely in one ear. Everyone kept urging me to go to the doctor. But I have no insurance, little money, and I’ve always had a very robust constitution. I decided to try to weather the storm.

My girlfriend is pretty much deaf already. She has no hearing in one ear, and wears a hearing aid in the other. Of course she’s so brilliant and multi-talented that no one notices much. However, with the fluid-filled resonance chambers tuned up in my head, I found it painful to speak at a normal volume. I’ve been, shall we say, reserved volume-wise. This causes a problem. She can’t understand me half the time now. Of course, not being used to hearing loss, I can’t hear her either. There’s been a lot of wandering around the house going What?.

Thankfully, tonight the pressure in my head seems to be subsiding. While my hearing in that ear still isn’t quite right, it is much better. My eardrum didn’t explode. And the experience has taught me quite a bit.

Now I know what it’s like to have to consciously focus and give a great deal of attention to what is said. If you listen carefully, even when impaired, you can be completely functional. But it takes a lot of effort and concentration, and it is exhausting. It’s a good thing there wasn’t anything really crucial going on, because I was ill-prepared before this to give things that kind of attention. My mind is always drifting off, thinking of other things. But if you can’t hear well, you can’t do that. Conversation becomes all you do, instead of just a part of a larger communicative process. It becomes very difficult to multi-task. Everything must be focused on simply communicating, if you are going to be good at it.

I admire my girlfriend a little more every day.