Life After Deaf

by Noel Holston

  Copyright © 2019 by Noel Holston

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Paul Qualcom

  Cover image credit: Getty Images

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-4687-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-4688-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Marty, my spark

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction by David Bianculli

  Monkey Business

  Doctor, Doctor

  Whispers in Bedlam

  Closed Captioning

  Wicked

  I’d Rather Go Blind

  Sitting Here in Limbo

  Pride and Prejudice

  Location, Location, Location

  Masters of Disguise

  Goldberg Variations

  Drill, Baby, Drill

  Helplessly Hoping

  We’ll Remember Always, Activation Day

  Country Roads

  Here Comes the Night

  Blue Christmas

  Radiant Beams

  Dancing in the Dark

  The Witch Doctor

  Hello, It’s Me

  Revise and Consent

  CapTales

  I Say a Little Prayer

  Realm of the Senses

  Fight Club

  House Call

  Crossed Swords

  Ear We Go Again

  I Love LA

  Reactivation

  Rabbit Box

  Back to Life

  Duluth

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix

  Song Credits

  Author’s Note

  This is a book about how going deaf changed my life, my identity, my marriage, my relationship with the world. It’s a chronicle of what I’ve done to cope, what I’ve learned about hearing loss and communication, and what it might be like for you or someone in your life. An estimated 40 million American are deaf or hearing impaired. Our numbers grow every day.

  … and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

  —John Donne

  Bell? What bell?

  —Noel Holston

  Introduction

  Usually, the purpose of an introduction is to do precisely that: introduce the reader to a book’s subject, tone, and author, as a place setter for what is to follow. But already, before arriving to this point, the reader has been handed significant hints from the author himself.

  The book’s very title, Life After Deaf, is a giveaway tell that Noel Holston not only is not above the occasional puns, but revels and wallows in wordplay. The author’s note, placed before these pages, clearly establishes the book’s approach to the subject of being hearing impaired, a focus at once contextually wide and personally specific. By telling his own story so honestly, Noel manages to shed light on scores of millions of others. And the third piece of evidence supplied by the author in the pages before this intro, the overleaf, is the capper: He betrays his love of literature and popular culture by quoting John Donne, then follows it with his own unexpected, wry rejoinder. As I read the galleys for this book, that hilarious one-two punch truly made me laugh out loud—and the book itself hadn’t even started yet. Those early clues, taken together, are ample early evidence of what you can expect to experience throughout Life After Deaf: an uncommon combination of incisive intelligence and playful humor.

  Long before Noel Holston finally decided to write his memoir and become an author, he toiled, as I did and still do, in the field of TV criticism. As such, he was one of the very best writers on the beat, and also one of the best reporters and analysts. Those are three distinctly different skills, and all three are the secret weapons he employs when turning his focus inward. Because of his background as a reporter, Noel does the necessary research to know what he’s talking about, asks all the right questions, and pays attention to the actions and reactions of those around him. He’s honest enough to describe what he’s feeling, and hearing or not hearing, every step of the way, so he takes you with him from start to finish. And he’s such a good writer that he’s always making references and observations that help ground his story and make it relatable, while trusting that, especially in writing a memoir, honesty is the best policy. As a result, Life After Deaf is a bravely unfiltered and wide-ranging voyage, with Noel as a charming tour guide—taking you not only deep inside his ear canal, but deep inside his marriage and his mind, as well.

  By telling his own story so personally, and so personably, Noel has written something here that is more than just informative or inspirational—though it’s both of those, big-time. Life After Deaf, as I read it, also is a love letter. He doesn’t omit or neglect the feelings of his wife and family and freely acknowledges that, as with anyone suffering through any malady or tragedy, those burdens are seldom carried alone. By including those around him in his story, even when observing how much his behavior is irritating them, the tale he’s telling is more relatable, more empathetic, and ultimately more real.

  This book can be read as a primer: what to expect, and perhaps what to avoid, when noticing that your auditory senses are beginning to wane significantly. And as a memoir, telling the story of a writer who finds ways to adapt as both his journalistic career and his hearing skills shift through the years. But please don’t underestimate the power of Noel’s storytelling, and his love of music and pop culture, laced through every page of this narrative. It’s what ultimately makes this very serious memoir so funny and joyful. References come from all over and pop up at unexpected times, yet always stick their landings, whether he’s comparing a cockeyed mechanics of the human ear to a Rube Goldberg contraption or making apt references to the Marvel comic superhero Daredevil or David Seville’s novelty hit “Witch Doctor.” And I’m sorry—but when a retirement-age white man with hearing problems refers to himself as “Mos Deaf,” he deserves, if not demands, to be heard.

  And hearing, after all, is at the center of Noel’s story. Turn the page and experience it for yourself…

  —David Bianculli, Fresh Air TV Critic

  and Rowan University professor of TV Studies

  Chapter 1

  Monkey Business

  Our bedroom was chilly when I slid out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom to relieve myself. It was the beginning of my winter daybreak ritual: Get up. Relieve. Wash hands. Clomp downstairs. Turn up thermostat. Turn on coffee maker. Feed cats.

  But as I stood over the toilet in the nightlight’s blue glow, I heard no splash. “Hmm,” I murmured to myself.

  The hmm was inaudible, too. I stepped over to the sink and turned the handle. The water I saw rushing from the faucet was a silent stream. “Hmm,” I murmured again.

  I surveyed my face in the medicine cabinet mirror. I watched my lef
t hand as I reached up and rubbed my left ear. The sound it made was faint, distant, and dull as cotton. I rubbed my right ear with my right hand. Nothing. Nothing at all.

  I shuffled back to bed and lay down next to my wife, eyes fixed on the ceiling. I woke Marty, not meaning to, with what I would have sworn was whispering. I was mouthing words—names, numbers, snippets of songs—hoping to find a tone, a pitch, that would register as sound. She told me later that her first sleepy thought when my mumbling woke her was that I had suffered a stroke.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” she asked. Her face loomed over me like a pale moon. I responded to her worried look, not her words.

  “Your lips are moving,” I said, “but there’s no sound.”

  “Nothing?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  She came around to my side of the bed and switched on the brass lamp on my nightstand. She motioned for me to sit up and then pushed a folded pillow behind me. Marty is medically knowledgeable. One of the many day jobs she’s worked in her life as a singer, songwriter, and musician is certified nurse’s attendant. She wanted to look me over and assess whether we needed to race to the nearest emergency room.

  She plucked a tissue from the box on our bookcase headboard. “Blow your nose,” she said, miming the gesture.

  I blew, careful not to push too hard, and then again, harder. She gave me a how-now look. I shook my head and shrugged my befuddlement.

  She put her face up close to my left ear. I could faintly detect the word “sleep.” I lay back down on my side. She switched off the light and crawled back into bed with me.

  Though she was spooned against my back, I was alone in my thoughts. I took stock. My left ear had faded over a period of half a dozen years, starting in the mid-1990s. I’d had a series of hearing aids. My good ear, the right, had been getting weaker, though gradually. I had composed a sort of prose poem (see Dropping the Needle, page 197) a few days earlier. It extolled my ability to summon familiar music from memory. I had planned to perform it later in the week at Word of Mouth, a monthly poetry and spoken-word jam at a downtown bar in Athens, Georgia, where we live. It was a knack that I had presumed would come in handy in the event my hearing ever got really, really bad. But I had never expected a loss so sudden, so dramatic. I had been fending off a mild cold and was sniffling a bit, but surely that couldn’t be the instigation for what seemed close to a total collapse.

  The night before, March 3, 2010, I had gone to bed able to hear all manner of everyday sounds and comprehend conversation easily with a little amplification. Yet here I was on the morning of March 4 so auditorily challenged I could only faintly detect the sound of my own voice in my head.

  I lay there cuddled up to Marty trying to will myself unconscious, hoping I could indeed sleep it off. The prospect of a silent or near-silent existence didn’t scare me to death—I understood, intellectually at least, that there are millions of people who live and work and play without any hearing at all. I only felt a wave of sadness. I had never been good with quiet. I was raised in a household in which there was almost always a record player or a radio going, sometimes more than one. I had spent sixty years in a sonic marinade.

  Courtesy of Peabody Awards

  My thoughts floated to music, which I love as much if not more than conversation. In recent weeks, I had been driving around with a boom box in the front seat of my old Mazda because, for some reason, its tone worked better with my weakened ears than the in-dash stereo. I had been playing a CD that had been a promotional gimme for an Elvis Presley retrospective that his ex-wife, Priscilla, had produced for television. For many years I had critiqued TV programming for a living. Friends and newspaper colleagues never got tired of predicting that my brain was going to turn to mush or that I would go blind. Maybe they were onto something.

  The CD included rare alternative recordings of a few Elvis hits and some oddball studio outtakes. The last music I had heard on March 3 was Elvis and some of his pals goofing on an old Chuck Berry song, “Too Much Monkey Business,” a madcap, tongue-twisting litany of hassles, hoops, indignities, and idiocies the hero has had to duckwalk his way around and through.

  I have since come to think of it as musical prophecy, but I didn’t realize that morning just how apt it would be, a theme song for my adventures in hearing impairment, for the comedy of errors to come. Monkey business indeed.

  Chapter 2

  Doctor, Doctor

  Marty shook me awake an hour later. I was still hearing only the sounds of silence. It was strange, disorienting, and worrisome, but I resisted the urge to panic. Once, years earlier, my hearing nosedived during a flight from a press event in New York City back to Florida, where I wrote for a daily newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel. I suddenly couldn’t hear the passenger seated next to me. I couldn’t hear myself swallow. Flight attendants’ faces bobbed above me, their lips moving silently. It was surreal and alarming. But it was caused by head-cold congestion and cabin-pressure change. It cleared up by the time I got to baggage claim. Maybe this was just something similar. Maybe I just had waxy yellow build-up.

  Not knowing what else to do, I got up and had breakfast with Marty. I did my usual stretch routine, including rolling back and throwing my legs over my head. I took a long, hot shower and tugged on my earlobes as Marty had shown me, hoping to clear my Eustachian tubes. No dice.

  Marty, meanwhile, attempted to reach Dr. Ronald Leif Steenerson, a highly regarded otologist in Atlanta. I had seen him the previous fall in hopes that he could help me with tinnitus—ringing in my ears. He had diagnosed my problem as excess fluid in my inner ears. He prescribed a mild diuretic and told me to hide the saltshaker and do my best to resist the temptations of bacon and pepperoni. Steenerson was out of the country on vacation when Marty phoned his office.

  I got dressed and went to my office at the University of Georgia’s journalism school. I’m a notoriously dutiful worker bee. Marty never lets me forget the time when we were living in Minneapolis and she phoned me at the newspaper, the Star Tribune, and told me she’d fallen on a flight of stairs at the theater where she worked. She was worried her leg might be broken. She says that I said, “Oh, that’s terrible, honey, but I’m on deadline. Can someone else take you to the ER? I’ll get there as soon as I turn my column in!” Her memory is probably accurate.

  Driving toward the university, it was surreal not being able to tell if my car was running except by looking at the dashboard lights and stranger still to have to tell my colleagues by email to pass me notes if they wanted to converse with me.

  As the day wore on, however, I realized I was hearing a bit more. I emailed Marty and told her it appeared she had been right, that getting up and moving around had shaken the mucous or the crud or whatever out of my head. We laughed about our overreaction when I came home. For dinner we had her special chicken soup, freshly made and hopped up with spices, extra garlic, and fresh ginger. Its therapeutic and decongestant properties are legendary in our household, and she thought it would not only cure my sniffles, but reinvigorate my sinuses and ears.

  After eating a big bowl and inhaling the redolent steam, I sat down with her to watch an evening newscast. Halfway through, I reached across the sofa and tapped her on the knee. “Honey,” I said quietly. “It’s gone again. I can’t hear a thing.”

  Our hope of letting my ear problem work itself out dashed, Marty got on the phone to my younger brother, Tim. He was then an audiology professor at the University of South Alabama in Mobile and the coordinator of its hearing clinic. Tim was very concerned. He told Marty that sudden, severe hearing loss ideally needs to be treated within a week of its onset if there’s going to be much chance of restoration. The window for action is small.

  “Don’t put this off,” he said. “He needs to see a doctor tomorrow.”

  We slept fitfully, annoyed with ourselves. First thing the next morning, Marty found the phone number for an ear, nose, and throat specialist in Athens. She made a call and got me a midday
appointment with a doctor who, as it turned out, looked as though he could be singing lead in a Kenny Rogers tribute band. Learning that Marty was a singer, he started talking to her about his love of country music. It aggravated me that he couldn’t seem to comprehend how little of what he said I could understand. One would think an ear doctor would have a better appreciation of deafness, but no. He blabbed on and on, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, to me, he was a TV talking head and the mute button was on. Marty appraised him of my cold and slight congestion, but he prescribed no drug, no antibiotic, just patience—wait and see and it’ll probably bounce back.

  We weren’t happy with his plan of inaction, but there was no other ENT practice nearby that was in my Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia insurance network, and we were unfamiliar with Atlanta, an hour-and-a-half drive away. We grudgingly took Kenny’s advice. We gambled and waited for Dr. Steenerson to return from his trip. By the time I did get to see him, on March 15, or ten days later, my window apparently had slammed shut.

  Steenerson is a tall, bald man with military bearing. He’s a serious sport fisherman who has marlins hanging on the walls of his waiting room. Fishing and hunting magazines share the racks with Vanity Fair and Elle. He has a cabin in Montana. We had been cautioned before my first appointment with him about his lack of bedside manner, and he had not disappointed. He was only slightly warmer than the big fish on his walls. Marty is playful and elfin, part Peter Pan, part Cyndi Lauper. She has been known to charm rocks. So she was determined to establish a human connection with Steenerson this time around.

  “Nice boots,” she said, nodding toward his cowboy footwear.

  “What?” he said, looking annoyed to be interrupted.

  “Nice boots,” she repeated. “I grew up in Nebraska. I know nice boots when I see ’em.”

  He cocked a disapproving fuzzy eyebrow at her. He grunted and went back to looking in my ear with an otoscope.

  We came to understand that as gruff and cranky as he sometimes seemed, what we were experiencing was actually his extreme focus as he processed what he saw and heard from his patient. He’s a good, generous fellow, beloved by his staff.