Life After Deaf

by Noel Holston

  As the representatives of thirty-plus winning programs took their turns coming on stage and making their acceptance speeches, it crossed my mind that just two years earlier, the Peabodys had honored Hear and Now, a bittersweet documentary by a woman whose parents, lifelong deaf, decided to undergo cochlear implant surgery and had distinctly different reactions to their rendezvous with sound. The wife was thrilled to hear sound for the first time in her life, but her husband not so much, and it had caused a rift. I had made a point of speaking to the filmmaker and her mom and dad at the reception, but only because I had found the documentary so informative, honest, and poignant. I never dreamed it might be a portent of my future.

  Chapter 4

  Closed Captioning

  Entertainment options shrink when a person’s hearing fails. The typical multiplex cranks up movie soundtracks to earth-shaking levels, but louder isn’t necessarily better. If anything, what was left of my left-ear hearing was especially sensitive to high-decibel noise, and I didn’t want to risk further damage. Athens has but one theater that occasionally screens a foreign film with subtitles, and while I do enjoy an occasional Swedish or French flick, I am partial to English-speaking movies. Which led me back to television, the medium on which I was raised and from which I made my living for many years after selling shoes and reading meters for the power company didn’t work out.

  The electronic media was my beat at the Orlando Sentinel in 1979, when the technology to create closed captions for TV programs was introduced and the nonprofit National Captioning Institute was launched. I went to a demonstration of the new, much-ballyhooed system and wrote a column about it for the paper. I explained how, if you had the proper device wired into your TV set, you could call up the sort of subtitles you’d see in a theater of a screening of a foreign film.

  Neither my home nor office TV sets at the time had the new technology, however, and both my ears still worked just fine, so I never really got around to testing the system on an everyday basis. I just assumed it worked exactly as publicized. Even years later, when I had a caption-capable set, the only time I ever turned it on was occasionally while watching Masterpiece Theatre on PBS. The sound quality on British imports such as Upstairs, Downstairs and I, Claudius was notoriously poor back then. Moreover, while the lords and ladies’ stage diction rang clear enough, some of the servants’ accents were so thick, they might as well have been speaking Scottish Gaelic. I made use of the captioning feature any time I encountered Dickens, Shakespeare, or Bob Hoskins, and I was ever so grateful.

  Now that I found myself needing captioning all the time, I discovered an aggravating truth: some of the time it flat out sucks.

  To be sure, closed captioning is a great boon to the deaf and hearing impaired, a godsend really. Yet there are times when I have found no captions preferable, times when the crawl on-screen should say, “Closed Captioned in Bulgarian.” There are times when the on-screen end credit should say the captioning is provided by a grant from the Daffy Duck Foundation or the Marx Brothers Trust or, on particularly frustrating, diabolical occasions, the Joker. Times when the choice is between turn off the “CC” or throw a shoe at your flat-screen.

  That’s not really surprising when you’re talking about live programming such as sporting events and news reports. The frequency of unusual names and technical terms is bound to result in errors, especially if the captions are being generated by voice-recognition software.

  But the quality of captions for prerecorded programs also varied sharply. PBS, presumably because of its civic mission and its older-

  skewing audience, was the best and most consistent. Not only do its signature shows—Masterpiece, Nature, NOVA—boast exceptionally reliable captions, but it’s rare to encounter mangled captions, let alone gibberish, on any of its dramas, documentaries, or investigative reports, as well.

  Among commercial networks, CBS tended to be the most reliable, owing no doubt to awareness of an older core audience. 60 Minutes is meticulously captioned, right down to the promos and correspondent intros. And popular CBS entertainment series such as The Big Bang Theory, NCIS, and Blue Bloods rarely have enough captioning glitches to be distracting.

  At the other end of the spectrum were ABC and Fox, both of which court younger audiences. I’m not talking about misspelled words or translating “cruel” as “gruel.” I’m talking about alphabetical train wrecks. The captioning of Modern Family, ABC’s most acclaimed comedy and its most broadly appealing, was sometimes so incomprehensibly botched that it might have been medieval runes. Likewise, The Simpsons, Fox’s immortal animated comedy, which is not only produced in South Korea, but also seemed at times to have been captioned in Korean, as well.

  The DVD versions and syndicated reruns of these and other caption-impaired shows have accurate captions. If you don’t mind waiting a few months to a year to see what your friends saw last night, you’ll be able to understand every line.

  Well, maybe. By the time I started writing this book, closed captioning had started to be more consistent and less error-prone, but a new problem for the hearing impaired had emerged: speed.

  TV storytelling had always tended to be more talky and less visual than movies, but the splintering of the viewing audience by cable and streaming services has left platforms and producers obsessively time-conscious, fearful of short attention spans. Thus, the talk on TV is increasingly turbocharged.

  Sitcoms that had once been paced like stage plays took on the frantic feel of 1930s screwball comedies like His Gal Friday and Bringing Up Baby. If All in the Family was Archie Bunker’s old LaSalle doing forty-five mph, Modern Family is a BMW zipping along at seventy. The back-and-forth on cable-news cage matches like Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Rachel Maddow Show is as dizzying as Olympic ping-pong. Even the broadcast networks’ early-evening newscasts, though the commercials for drugs and denture adhesives indicate an awareness of an older audience, have taken on a breathless pace (yes, I’m talking about you, David “Breaking News!” Muir). Only a speed-reader can keep up, and even then, it’s often at the expense of the images flashing by. You “watch” TV or you read it. It’s hard to do both.

  The best alternatives I’ve found are old Western movies with long takes on mountain vistas and slower-talking stars like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. I’ve even tried pretalkies, reacquainting myself with the genius of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. And then there are books. Hearing loss will make a person renew his or her library card.

  Chapter 5

  Wicked

  By the middle of June, three months after my ear wreck, it was clear that methotrexate was having little discernible impact on my hearing loss. I might experience a slight, encouraging gain midday only to have it disappear by dinnertime, or I would experience no gain at all. I was sleeping poorly, a side effect of the drug I’d been warned about. One night, when I was sleeping soundly, I was startled out of slumber by what sounded like the shrieking sound effect that accompanies the notorious shower scene in Psycho. It wasn’t the alarm on my bedroom clock radio going off or a car alarm on the street in front of our house. It was just my sound-starved ears having a little fun.

  I was weary and low-energy, unsure whether I was reacting to medication or truly depressed. The new normal for me hearing-wise was good enough to detect rattling cutlery in the silverware drawer or the coffee grinder’s grating whine, little more. The cruder the sound, it seemed, the easier. An audiologist told me this was because crude sound, unlike conversational speech or music, requires only that we recognize it. We don’t have to extract any meaning from it.

  Other than having people write me notes on a steno pad, text messaging was by default my main means of communication. Downie Winkler, my stepdaughter, had shamed me into belatedly adopting the thumb-typing cell-phone system so essential to her generation and so often much ridiculed by me. Now texting was my lifeline. Not only did Marty and I text back and forth while I was at the Peabody office, but we also occasionally texted inside ou
r house. It was easier sometimes for her than flipping lights on and off to get my attention or throwing a ball of rolled-up socks at me.

  At the office, I had Marty record a message on UGA’s automated answering system advising potential entrants, network publicists, and salespeople that “Noel Holston, public relations coordinator of the Peabody Awards, is currently dealing with a hearing loss and would much appreciate it if you would contact him at his email address.”

  My colleagues, even those whose offices adjoined mine, largely stopped sticking their heads in my door or trying to chat. They just emailed.

  I couldn’t participate in phone conversations or hear messages left on my machine. I couldn’t make a haircut appointment by phone, order pizza, or tell a telemarketer to get lost. Radio was a no-go. TV worked for me only with crap-shoot closed captioning. Face-to-face conversation was almost impossible with anyone but Marty, and even she was beginning to lose patience.

  I was already notorious in my family for my tendency to space out and miss social cues. Now, mired in my growing frustration, I did not appreciate how taxing it was to be around me for more than a few minutes at a time. Conversation is like breathing to Marty. When she’s with a group of friends or her brothers and sisters—she’s one of fourteen siblings—the talk is like a jazz jam, with swoops and sudden segues. Our first meeting had been an invigorating jabber-fest. Our marriage was an ongoing conversation, a free-form discussion of life, spirituality, politics, and art, a rat-a-tat exchange of banter, barbs, asides, and puns. Now we were on the level of “See Spot run.”

  She bought me an American Sign Language picture book and started teaching me the sign alphabet. She had learned the ABCs and some basic ASL phrases when she read The Miracle Worker in a high-school English class. I practiced, protesting all the while that I knew no one particularly well, excepting her, who was even moderately conversant in ASL, and that if I were no better at learning sign than I’d been at Spanish or French, it would be years before we could have anything resembling a lively conversation. She finger-spelled an expression I will not quote in a family-friendly book. I got busy working on my ABCs.

  * * *

  Dr. Fishman told me, through Marty, to discontinue the methotrexate. He sent us back to Dr. Steenerson, who said he was stymied and out of options, save one: a cochlear implant.

  I was open to the idea of getting a bionic ear; I’d read about it in science magazines and done a bit of internet research. Marty was game, as well. There was one slight hitch. Dr. Steenerson was not in the pool of physicians covered by my Blue Cross Blue Shield HMO plan. Out-of-network office visits were one thing. We could bite the bullet and pay $250-$300 out of pocket for the services of a specialist like him. But a cochlear implant operation could set us back. Way back. For the same amount of money an implant operation would cost, we could buy a new BMW and a Ford Expedition SUV and still have enough change left for a week’s vacation in Paris and a jumbo bag of M&Ms. Even in the best of times, that would have been a gargantuan bullet to bite. But this was June 2010, two years after the burst housing bubble and the ensuing stock market dive had ravaged our retirement savings.

  We told Dr. Steenerson that as much as we would prefer to have him operate—he was, after all, a cochlear-surgery pioneer and widely considered the best in the Southeast at his specialty—we’d have to find someone in our insurance network to perform the implantation. He said he understood and had one of his office staff provide us with a list of other cochlear surgeons in the Atlanta area.

  We settled on Dr. Karen Hoffmann of Piedmont ENT, a large, thriving practice in an upscale section of Atlanta called Buckhead. She was relatively young but had performed hundreds of implantations. Reviews of her work online were glowing. And she was covered by my Blue Cross plan. We liked her, and the clinic’s nurses and office staff were sympathetic and friendly.

  Dr. Hoffmann surprised us, however, by not scheduling me for surgery immediately. She said she had another treatment she’d like to try first, something new, a sort of hearing Hail Mary pass. Theorizing that the oral steroid that I had taken had diminishing impact because it was too diffused, she wanted to put a “micro wick,” a tiny stent, in the eardrum of my right ear. Through it, I would apply Dexamethasone ear drops directly to my middle ear, three times a day.

  “If it doesn’t work,” she said, “we’ll schedule the implant surgery for fall.”

  I said sure, what the heck. I already have a pierced ear. Might as well have a pierced eardrum. I’ll be a guinea pig. I would just as well not have her—or any other doctor—bore a hole in my skull and wire up my cochlea.

  Thus began a month of dribbling the liquid corticosteroid into my ear morning, noon, and night and lying on my side for ten to fifteen minutes while it dripped into my middle ear and, seemingly, into my brain itself. I was instructed not to swim, period, and to stay out of the shower until I got a custom ear plug to seal the ear canal off. I also had to chase the Dexamethasone drops with antibacterial Ofloxacin drops to minimize the chance of infection around the wick. It made me think of the old folk song about an old woman who swallowed a fly, then a succession of larger critters, and lastly a horse. She died, of course, but I tried not to dwell on that.

  During this experiment, my tinnitus, a problem off and on for years, reached new highs. And lows. And attained sound effects that I could never have imagined.

  Nature is said to abhor a vacuum. The human ear and brain abhor silence. If auditory stimulation from the outside world is cut off, the brain and the ear will make up for it, creating phantom sounds usually labeled tinnitus. Though it’s sometimes used interchangeably with “ringing in the ears,” tinnitus can in fact take many forms, from beeping and squeaking to buzzing and shrieking. It can also be impressively complex. Midsummer, my tinnitus went into overdrive. Perhaps because I had spent so much of my life immersed in music—dancing to it, cooking to it, driving to it, making love to it—my tinnitus often had a symphonic element.

  Years of reporting and columnizing on a daily basis had made writing reflexive for me. I try not to let any experience go to waste. To paraphrase an old saying, that which doesn’t kill you makes for a good story. So, in August, I composed an essay about my crazy tinnitus. It was published on www.likethedew.com, a Georgia-based website. The Dew is officially “A journal of progressive Southern culture & politics,” but founder Lee Leslie grants regular contributors like myself some leeway so long as we’re Dixie bred.

  This is what I posted under the headline “Radio Head”:

  Since my ears stopped working almost six months ago, I’ve heard a ton of music. But I don’t mean that I’ve been summoning up old favorite recordings from memory, although I am fortunate enough to be able to do that. I can “play” most of the Beatles’ canon and dozens of albums in my head anytime I care to, more or less whole.

  I’m talking about music that my brain and my sickly inner ears generate entirely on their own. Spontaneously. Electro-chemically. Unstoppably.

  For the past couple of weeks, pretty much every minute I was awake, I heard a tune strongly reminiscent of “Telstar,” the instrumental by the Tornados that became a chart-topper in 1962 thanks to its “weird” space-age sound.

  Now, you may be thinking, “Good grief, ‘Telstar’ 24/7—it’s a wonder he hasn’t drowned himself yet.” But the thing is, I’m a glass half-full kind of a guy. If I have to have a moldy-oldie instrumental looping through my head, I would prefer something that sounds more like the Chantays’ “Pipeline” or Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo.” But I am very grateful I’m not stuck with, oh, the Champs’ “Tequila” or Paul Muriat’s “Love Is Blue.” Well, not yet anyway.

  The riffs running through my head have a tendency to change unpredictably. For a while, it was an unfamiliar progression of bass notes. For another while, it was something that sounded kind of like Nancy Wilson’s roaring, power-chord intro to Heart’s “Crazy on You.” And yet another while, in a rare classical interlude,
it was like “March of the Wooden Soldiers” from The Nutcracker. More than once I caught myself in mid-strut with a garden rake or a broom over my shoulder as the family cat, Cadbury, observed me with more than his usual disdain.

  According to my research, I have been experiencing “musical hallucinations,” a variation of tinnitus, the phantom sounds often heard by people whose hearing is going, going or gone. The Mayo Clinic website lists half a dozen common tinnitus “sounds”: ringing, buzzing, roaring, clicking, whistling, hissing.

  Each of these is an old friend now, but the single-word designations don’t do my experience justice. There are times when I wonder if I have a phantom Phil Spector in my head, overproducing my tinnitus variations in his famous “Wall of Sound” style.

  At various times, I hear:

  Torrents of Spring—Raging, rushing water, occasionally punctuated by what sounds like a frightened animal being swept away.

  Red River—Not to be confused with Torrents of Spring, this is the sound of a stampede, like the thundering, climactic cow-panic in the classic John Wayne Western.

  747—Not like you hear inside the big jet; like what the ground crew would hear if they took off their ear mufflers.

  Hearts of Space—Reminiscent of what you’d hear on the long-running, late-night radio series devoted to New Age, ambient and electronic “space” music, it’s sweeping, free-form sound, like something from an old Isao Tomita album, interrupted by gurgles, beeps and the arcing sonic equivalent of shooting stars.

  Factory Floor—An industrial cacophony.

  These variations of tinnitus do not necessarily take turns manifesting themselves. I may “hear,” for instance, Torrents of Spring in one ear and Factory Floor in the other while that “Telstar”-like riff or the “Wooden Soldiers” theme is also audible. And while this is all going on, entirely beyond my control, I can consciously recall an entirely different song or a harmony.