Life After Deaf

by Noel Holston

  After conducting a physical examination of my right ear, Steenerson had one of the audiologists on his staff put me in a sound-proof testing booth to determine which tones I could hear and which words, if any, I could comprehend. I dutifully punched a button when I detected faint beeps in my headphones and then attempted to repeat simple words the audiologist read. Studying the pitiful results, Steenerson explained that I had experienced a sensorineural loss. The cilia—the microscopic hairs in my inner ear that wave in the breezes of sound like a wheat field or a kelp forest—had been knocked over and flattened. They had fallen and couldn’t get up.

  Marty translated what I couldn’t understand, either speaking directly to my face with exaggerated mouth movements or writing on a note pad.

  I asked if he could tell what had caused the sudden drop-off. Steenerson told us it could be viral, allergenic, a reaction to medication, or the result of a blow to the head.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had been ill with anything worse than indigestion or a middling cold. I was ridiculously healthy. My only allergy is to penicillin and thus bread mold, which makes me break out in hives and blows up my lips and tongue, but I hadn’t had a bad-muffin episode in ages. The only medication I was taking daily was a multivitamin and occasional niacin tablet for my tinnitus. As for blows to the head, there was that time I hit loose gravel on my bike on the way to a Cub Scout meeting, fell headlong onto the pavement, and spent half a day out cold. There were the innumerable times I had been battered by bad-hop baseballs. But those were childhood lumps. I hadn’t been hit by anybody or anything as an adult since, well, since I accidentally offended a drunk at a bar while I was living on Long Island, New York, and writing for Newsday. But even that sucker punch to the head was a good five years before my ears went kaput.

  Steenerson arranged for some tests, including an MRI. That would be standard procedure anyway, but there was also a red-flag medical history matter: my father developed a malignant brain tumor and died at the age of forty-seven, when I was still a teenager. I was now sixty-two.

  If you’ve never had an MRI, it’s an acronym for magnetic resonance imaging. Instructed to hold deadly still, the patient is slid into a sort of fiberglass and metal womb and bombarded with magnetic impulses that generate computer images of bone and tissue. It looks like something Dr. McCoy would use to diagnose ailing crew members on the Starship Enterprise. While it scans you, it makes creaking, whirring, thumping noises that sound like the warm-up of a rhythmically challenged polka band. The magnetism is so strong, neither patient nor technician can be in the same room with the machine while wearing a watch. If you happen to have a steel plate in your skull or a pin in your ankle, forget it. It will glom onto you as if it were a refrigerator and you were a magnet encased in a little plastic butterfly. Some people find the prospect of getting scanned about as appealing as being sealed in a coffin. But I didn’t mind. I just closed my eyes and imagined I was lying on a beach. To my barely functioning left ear, the MRI’s rattle and clunk sounded vaguely like lapping waves.

  The scan found nothing amiss, so it was back to guessing the cause. Dr. Steenerson said it actually didn’t make much difference as far as treatment was concerned. Whatever the cause, the effect was what he had to treat. And there were only so many options available to him.

  I breathed a secret sigh of relief that he hadn’t told me loud music was the culprit. The thought had crossed my mind more than once. What if I was like the longtime smoker who had gambled that lung cancer or emphysema only happened to other people? What if I was like the guy who never met a chocolate bar or a lemon drop he didn’t like and who one fine morning gets a diabetes diagnosis? What if the music I loved so much and was already missing terribly was in fact a cause? I had told myself that I hadn’t abused my ears nearly as much as many guys my age. I was never one to live with headphones on. I had stopped going to mega-amped concerts years earlier. My brother the audiologist, who knows better, was far more likely to ride around in a sealed automobile with Joe Bonamassa ripping scorching blues licks at top volume. And he could still hear.

  I was thrilled that Dr. Steenerson let me off the hook. Neither I nor U2 was to blame. It was a mystery.

  Chapter 3

  Whispers in Bedlam

  Dr. Steenerson’s first line of attack was to put me on a daily steroid dosage. With luck, he believed, it might still snap my fallen cilia to attention.

  The first couple of days I was on Prednisone, nothing much changed. I experienced slightly improved hearing in my right ear for two or three hours after I woke up, but it faded in the afternoon, and, by night, I couldn’t understand Marty’s words from a foot away, much less the narration of a newscaster on television.

  Then came a personal Big Bang. On the third day of Prednisone, the hair cells in my cochlea rose from the dead. I had driven to the Athens YMCA, where we had a membership, to work out. After riding a stationary bike for twenty minutes to get my heart pumping, stretching, and then lifting some weights, I started down the hall from the fitness area to the locker room. I was jolted by what seemed like surround sound at a movie theater. It was as if a stereo system had just been turned on. Loud. I heard a wonderful squealing melee of children playing in the Y’s several gyms. I could detect conversations among people walking ten to fifteen feet ahead of me. I hadn’t heard so much sound in years.

  Outside in the parking lot, I could hear birds and the swoosh and rumble of cars and trucks passing on Hawthorne Avenue. When I started my car, it wasn’t just the faint, dull groan to which I had become accustomed. I heard the key turn in the ignition. I heard the engine crackle to life and roar. I heard the squeak of a fan belt and the rattle of my key chain clacking against the dashboard as I drove away.

  I turned on the radio, preset to WUGA, the University of Georgia radio station. National Public Radio’s Renée Montagne was reading a news report. I could understand her. It was as though she were in the passenger’s seat next to me. “Hello, Renée!” I shouted.

  At an intersection a block away, I stopped for the red light. A car pulled up in the turn lane on my left. My window was open, and so were theirs. I could hear the two guys in the car talking. I turned my radio down. The guys were discussing where they were going to go for a beer. I could make out some of what they were saying over the rock music playing in their car. It sounded familiar. I concentrated hard. I recognized the cadence. Yes! Allman Brothers’ “Rambling Man.” It felt as though my whole body had been zapped with a rejuvenating ray. I felt so alive. I wanted to cry. I wanted to dance.

  As I drove on toward home, a distant memory popped into my head. A title: “Whispers in Bedlam.” It’s an Irwin Shaw short story that I had read in Playboy decades earlier. I really did buy it for the articles. Mostly.

  Shaw’s story is about a journeyman National Football League defensive player who undergoes surgery to repair a hearing problem and ends up with ears like Superman’s. He can overhear the opposing team’s offensive huddles, and his seemingly supernatural ability to anticipate plays makes him a sudden sensation.

  I didn’t feel like an all-star, but I felt exhilarated. I could hear with a precision I could never remember having. I had what Marty calls “country ears”—hearing like a hunter, like a deer, like a bobcat.

  I couldn’t wait to get home to listen to her. We sat on the love seat in our TV nook and talked and talked and talked. It was exhausting. It was heaven.

  That night, we watched the new episode of Lost on ABC. I didn’t turn on the wireless headphone apparatus that my stepdaughter, Downie, had bought for me so I wouldn’t have to turn the TV volume up so loud for everyone else. I understood what the characters were saying. I heard them. Every word.

  The miracle was short-lived.

  The next morning when I awakened, my speech comprehension was weaker. It picked up after I had my black coffee, granola, and Prednisone tablets, but it didn’t reach the giddy, preternatural level of the previous day. By week’s end, I was b
ack to having a slight improvement starting around midmorning and then inevitably segueing into life as silent movie by midafternoon.

  I also began to recognize another manifestation of hearing loss. Even when it was suspected that the cause of my tinnitus was Meniere’s disease, I had not suffered the dizziness and loss of balance that often accompanies that syndrome. I remained lucky on that count. What was impaired, however, was my ability to use my hearing to gauge my physical place in the world.

  We don’t think of ourselves as having an internal sounding system—sonar, like bats or whales. We hear no “ping, ping” like the crew of a deep-diving submarine. Yet we do use our hearing, in concert with our vision, to continuously monitor our spatial relationship to people and things. Our brains make ongoing, unconscious calculations from all our sensory input to keep us from wheeling around suddenly and whacking a stranger in the face when we’re waiting in line to purchase tickets to a movie or to buy our groceries. We hear faint echoes that help us know how low to duck our heads when we climb into a car. Hearing helps us gauge where we end and the rest of the world begins.

  At my most deaf, I banged my head getting in and out my car and cracked my noggin on the underside of kitchen cabinet doors I forgot I had opened. I had to start making a conscious effort to notice spatial relationships. It was either that or buy a football helmet.

  * * *

  The last week of that March was torture. For three decades, I had made my living covering arts and entertainment, primarily television, for a succession of newspapers. After I left Newsday in the fall of 2005 and relocated to Athens, I lucked into the offer of a part-time job doing public relations for the University of Georgia-based George Foster Peabody Awards, which is akin to a Pulitzer Prize for TV and radio and a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

  My job at the Peabodys included writing press releases and articles for our website and staging and promoting events—screenings of winning programs and speaking engagements by winners on the University campus. But the crucial chore was to take notes during the annual judging process and write the winners-announcement news bulletin and the descriptive “citations” that appear in the souvenir program of the ceremony we staged every spring in New York. The citations are intended to reflect the deliberations of the Peabody board.

  The judges winnow more than a thousand entries down to a list of about thirty winners. It takes them four days. Four 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (sometimes 7 or 8 p.m.) days of near-constant chatter. Trying to catch a quotable phrase here and there requires intense, constant concentration.

  The process was challenging for me even when my hearing was still pretty good. Fifteen board members, the Peabody director, and assorted staffers sit at or around a long table in a narrow, high-ceiling room watching clips from TV and radio programs entered in the competition. Board members report on shows they’ve been assigned to view ahead of convening in Athens and recommend submissions they deem worthy of further evaluation. And they argue. Oh, how they argue. As they tout personal favorite programs and express misgivings about others, the sessions begin to resemble an intense scene from the famous jury-trial movie, 12 Angry Men. People talk over one another, playing verbal King of the Hill. A tossed-off quip I miss cracks up the room, the big laugh eclipsing any and all ripostes. Some Peabody jurors are quiet-voiced, “low talkers” in Seinfeld parlance. Some judges mumble. No matter whom I sit next to, some panelists at the table are out of my range. I would sometimes find myself as badly overmatched as I would be playing tennis with one of the Williams sisters. Well, almost.

  My solution this time, with my steroid-treated hearing weaker and unpredictable, was to flit around the edges of the table, constantly repositioning myself for optimum proximity to whoever was speaking. I felt like a human pinball, literally bouncing off the walls.

  Ultimately, there were too few understandable words and too much sound. Group laughter was a blitzkrieg for my sickly ears, an auditory assault. It was exhausting, and the impact lingered. In the quiet of my car driving home, my ears would ring as though I had been at a shooting range all day without any protective eargear. The board members arrived at their unanimous winners list Sunday morning, April 4, said their farewells, and headed to Atlanta to catch planes home to places as far flung as Ann Arbor and Hong Kong. I had never been so happy to see them leave. I composed the citations over the next two days in my office with the door shut.

  * * *

  What would prove to be one of my most embarrassing and humbling incidents of my near-deaf days happened in mid-April. I got to the back door of the Peabody Awards offices one workday morning and realized I didn’t have my key. I hiked around to the front of the building, got the receptionist to let me in, put my backpack and a bag of DVDs on a chair in the lobby, and headed back up the long, steep hill to the university ramp where I park.

  I climbed the stairs to the third floor, and there was my Mazda. Running. I could see a light stream of exhaust fumes coming out the tailpipe. I ran to the car and pulled on the front door handle. Locked. I barked a long string of expletives I could not hear. I had apparently gotten distracted when I had gotten out of the car. Not being able to hear the warning beeper, let alone the engine, I had instinctively flipped the lock and walked away.

  I’m a longtime AAA member, but I couldn’t call for assistance. Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t text them, either. AAA doesn’t do texting. I texted Marty, but she didn’t reply. I remembered she had gone to a medical appointment.

  I walked back down the hill to the Peabodys, sheepishly told a colleague what had happened, and asked if she could drive me to my house to get my spare keys. We drove, of course, in silence.

  I had no door key, either, but there was a possibility. Our house, like so many houses in hilly Athens, is built on an incline. The front of the house rests on solid ground, the back on stilts, fifteen feet high. We have a deck off the back of the house, a deck for which there are no stairs. There is a sliding glass door to the deck. We seldom lock it. I asked my colleague to wait. I dragged a garbage can alongside a corner post of the deck, turned the receptacle over, and climbed on top of it. From there, I was able to reach a crossbeam. I pulled myself up and began to shimmy up toward the railing. It was like being a kid on a jungle gym—the maneuver, not me. I found myself using muscles and contorting my body in ways it hadn’t been contorted in decades. I would be feeling it for days.

  I managed to drag myself up and over the railing. The sliding door wasn’t locked, thank God. I found the spare keys, changed clothes—my khakis and shirt were dirty from the climb—and zipped out the door to my colleague’s car. Ten minutes later, she dropped me off by the parking ramp. I unlocked my car and turned it off. Then I restarted it briefly so I could look at the fuel gauge. I had burned about a quarter tank. I took some comfort in knowing I was still getting pretty decent mileage.

  * * *

  In late April, on Dr. Steenerson’s referral, I went to see an Atlanta rheumatologist, Dr. Alan B. Fishman. With the oral steroid failing to have permanent impact, Steenerson speculated that my problem might be autoimmune. Fishman was personable, warm even, and clearly knew his stuff. And he wasn’t prone to feel-good promises. He prescribed a regimen of methotrexate, a drug developed to treat certain types of lung, breast, and skin cancer but also prescribed at times to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune illnesses like lupus and Crohn’s disease. The idea behind it is that the immune system has erroneously identified a destructive agent in the ear and is, in effect, attacking the ear itself.

  Methotrexate is serious medication. Dr. Fishman initially prescribed a low dosage, three 2.5 mg tablets per week, just to make sure it didn’t curdle my stomach. Once I embarked on the stronger, daily dosage ten days later, I had to get a blood test once a week to make sure it wasn’t damaging my liver or kidneys. After a few weeks, I was such a familiar figure at LabCorp, a testing facility in Athens, that the staff hailed my entrances—well, they waved—as though I were Norm Peterson, the geni
al barfly in the sitcom Cheers, sauntering toward his stool. I was on a first-name basis with three phlebotomists.

  I was doing my best not to give up on getting out and about. In late April, Marty was the warm-up act for singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III at The Melting Point, an Athens music club. She’d opened for him in the past when we lived in Minneapolis and on Long Island. As a thank-you at the Athens show, she surprised him with her rendition of “Kick in the Head,” his bitterly funny song about being cuckolded by a friend. Wainwright himself, notoriously prickly, was in unusually generous form, even honoring a request late in his show for his biggest hit, the novelty tune “Dead Skunk.” The Melting Point sound system was so loud I actually recognized what he was singing from the cadence—well, that and the fact it’s a banjo tune. Good visual cue. And since I knew the song well, I could fill in words I couldn’t understand. But when friends who joined us at our table tried to talk to me during the breaks, I had to pull my trusty stenographer’s pad from my bag and pass it around. I went home thinking of the night as a draw.

  In mid-May, Marty and I flew to New York for the Peabody Awards ceremony. The director insisted I go, though not in a taskmaster sense. It was more a reward. My main work, promoting the event and writing winners’ citations and copy for the souvenir program, was done well before I got on a plane. On ceremony day, my main function is shmoozing the press. I found I could glad-hand without hearing and fake my way through small talk. The reporters in attendance were so preoccupied they scarcely noticed I was mainly nodding and smiling.

  Honorees at the ceremony in the Waldorf-Astoria grand ballroom included CNN’s exhaustive coverage of the previous year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, The Good Wife, a Washington Post website series about traumatic brain injuries, and a dazzling science series, Wonders of the Solar System. The Peabody show was, as always, megaloud, the volume pumped up to ensure no one in the cavernous hall could not hear. Even I could make out many of the words spoken from the podium.