Life After Deaf

by Noel Holston

  In the Consonant Recognition exercise, you’re presented with a grid on your computer screen that looks a bit like a Bingo card. There are sixteen alphabetical combinations: aBa, aTa, aLa, aMa, aSHa, aGa, and so on. Various speakers, male and female, some with high, light voices, others with deeper, more resonant timbres, say the various phrases; and you have to click on the phrase on the grid that you believe you heard. You may think “aDa” is easily distinguishable from “aPa.” On my first try, I got only eight out of forty correct, and half of those were guesses.

  Progress was slow. Very slow. Almost imperceptible. I did Consonant Recognition daily in my office at the Peabodys, shutting my door so my coworkers wouldn’t hear the disembodied voices going “ah-Ka,” ah-Ba,” or the sound of a horse’s whinny or a frog’s croak. Yes, there was an exercise for learning to identify “everyday” sounds, including animal noises.

  Four cartoon drawings at a time would appear on the screen—for instance, a yawning man, a typewriter, a galloping horse, and a fluttering bat. A sound would waft from the computer speaker, and then I would be prompted to click on an image, matching it to the audio clue. When I finished clicking on the twenty-screen test, the Sound and Way Beyond program would automatically give me my score and tell me if I needed to repeat the test or was eligible to move up to a more difficult level. I felt like a kindergartner, a not terribly bright kindergartner, hoping to get a gold star from teacher. Or a kid playing Super Mario Brothers.

  There was an exercise for identifying musical sounds, as well. I discovered that I was better at differentiating a mooing cow from a ringing telephone than I was at distinguishing a piano from a flute, but I was better at both than I was with words, the thing I wanted most to hear at that moment.

  I was making such poor progress, I had Marty come to my office and take some of the tests. She has, as I have noted, amazing hearing, ears like a barn owl. She found the recorded voices a bit fuzzy, but it was impossible to tell if the problem was the computer’s speakers or my speakers. I emailed the help desk on the Cochlear Americas website and inquired whether other implantees had complained of the training program audio not being clear. I was told that the program had been thoroughly tested and that complaints were infrequent. Every implantee is different, I was reminded; I just needed to be patient and keep up the training.

  To me, perhaps defensively, it sounded as if I were being told that I wasn’t trying hard enough. But I was trying hard, I believed. I wanted desperately to be able to engage in something approximating normal conversation.

  Was I the problem, or was something not right with my bionic ear gear? I decided it was me, if only because I felt as though I had no other choice. It wasn’t as if I could have Dr. Hoffmann jiggle my wiring like it was an extension cord with a short, much less ask Blue Cross Blue Shield to pay for another operation just a month or two after I got my implant.

  Chapter 16

  Here Comes the Night

  While my waking hours were a constant quest to match sounds I detected to whichever creature or kitchen appliance was making them, my nights were an auditory void. Bedtime is a strange time for the cochlear-implant dependent, a stretch of peace and paranoia. When you remove the processor from the side of your skull and detach the magnet, you are deaf as a stone. It may not sound like such a bad thing, and in some regards that’s true. More than once, Marty griped over morning coffee and raisin bran about our neighbor’s “damn dog,” barking all night. To which I could honestly say, “What dog?”

  Dogs, late-night parties next door, hospital helicopters passing overhead, car alarms—none of it was audible to someone like me when I was unplugged. Then again, neither are tornado sirens, smoke alarms, or the sound of our cats rampaging through the house, knocking over vases and lamps.

  Years before I achieved this condition, I wrote a song about insomnia that I called “Maybe It’s the Snakes.” It’s partly a litany of things that you hear or imagine you hear because you can’t sleep—or that in fact keep you awake.

  “Maybe it’s the faucet/dripping down the drain/maybe it’s the wailing/in the distance of a train.” The title comes from another couplet: “Maybe it’s the spiders/maybe it’s the snakes/maybe it’s that growling sound/the ’frigerator makes.”

  At the time I wrote it, I kind of dreaded things that go bump or hiss in the night. Now, I longed for them.

  Without my artificial ears on, there was nothing there but me and my thoughts. I couldn’t wear my left-ear hearing aid to bed. If I rolled over to my left side and pinned it to my pillow, it squealed. The cochlear implant on the other side didn’t make that delightful stuck-pig sound, but rolling over and dragging it across the pillow case created a magnified scratching like a club DJ working a turntable. Psst-tish, sisk-tish, sisk-tish, psst-tish. Not pleasant, even if you’re into hip-hop. And besides, fourteen or fifteen waking hours of having the magnetic cap stuck to your noggin takes a toll. The robotized-sounding voices, the overamplified crash of cabinet doors and cutlery, the roar of white noise at the grocery store or the coffee shop—it gets old. The processor seated behind your outer ear, light though it is, can still leave the skin feeling rubbed raw and sore. The magnet pinches after a while. You need to be detached. You need some quiet time. Or at least you think you do.

  Sleeping is fine, the faster it comes and the deeper the better. You may even dream you can hear. But to wake up at three in the morning and not be able to conk out again for an hour or two is like being in a sensory deprivation tank. You’re not only deaf, but you are circumstantially blind. Sure, you could turn the lights on, but then your odds of regaining unconsciousness drop off considerably. So you lie there, peering into the darkness, hearing nothing, exploring the crevices between your teeth, tasting the onions from the burger you had for dinner, feeling every itch, and thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking.

  In these stretches of insomnia, my mind free-associates like mad. Worries about money, anxiety about health and aging, doubts about self-worth, confusion about life’s purpose and meaning, and BIG questions roil and mingle with snippets of song lyrics, thoughts about my kids, how they’re doing, and why they don’t write.

  Most of my life, I had used music as a balm and a sedative. Now it was not an option. Marty got me a book about meditation. A daily meditation practitioner herself, she was certain what I needed was a means of quieting an excessively busy brain.

  But how can I meditate if I can’t hear myself chanting, “Ommm,” right? She said I only need to hear it in my mind.

  I tried, with only occasional success. Mostly I just let my obsessive-compulsive side take over and make lists. Lists of clothing to take to the cleaners tomorrow. Lists of old movies I could order from Netflix. Lists of places in the world I’d like to visit. Lists of my favorite shortstops of all time. Lists of books I should finally get around to reading (Paradise Lost, War and Peace, The Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades of Grey). Lists of songs with “night” in the title (“Night Moves,” “Nights in White Satin,” “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” “Goodnight, Irene”).

  Eventually, I would put myself to sleep.

  Chapter 17

  Blue Christmas

  Christmas was approaching, my first as a guy with only slightly more hearing capacity than a yule log. First and only, I kept telling myself. First and only.

  Marty asked me what I wanted for Christmas. “Well, not CDs,” I said.

  In point of fact, music had been my holiday default for years. I don’t use a whole lot of tools that require electricity. I haven’t hunted since my Mississippi youth. I don’t golf. Fallen arches had long ago put a big crimp in my tennis game. Christmas for me was good chocolate, funny boxer shorts, and new music.

  What I wanted most, however, was old music, familiar music. I still have the copy of the Elvis Presley Christmas LP that I found under the tree when I was ten years old. It has a few scratches, but it’s still playable, and I wanted to hear it during the season to be jolly, just as I
had for decades. No go. I put it on the turntable, but I could barely track the cadence of familiar songs, much less comprehend the melody. I could hear Elvis singing in my head—but what I was missing was not my baby, but my working cochlea.

  For years, I had grumbled about the too-early onset of Christmas music, the increasingly inescapable presence not long after Halloween of Johnny Mathis and Bing Crosby crooning yuletide evergreens on the radio, in shops, and in elevators. Now, in my first near-deaf holiday season, I would have been thrilled to hear “Do You Hear What I Hear?” by the Johnny Mann Singers or “The Little Drummer Boy” by the Hollyridge Strings. I would have glowed to the sound of Christmas Muzak.

  Elvis’s Christmas LP was just part of my long-standing Christmas routine. I have other albums that I have treasured for years, especially A Nonesuch Christmas, an amazing sampling of music from the Renaissance and Middle Ages assembled by Nonesuch Records, a label that specialized in offbeat and overlooked classical music; The New Possibility, an album of musical meditations on the nativity by guitarist John Fahey; and a Modern Jazz Quartet best-of that included “England’s Carol,” the combo’s celebrated rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” and secular MJQ originals like “The Cylinder” and “The Golden Striker” that, in such close association, sounded as holiday-spirited as “Joy to the World.”

  Starting in early December, I would get up early and do my morning stretches to one of these records. It was my version of advent. I would bathe in the aural ambiance of festivity, calm, and reverence. What I had taken for granted in December 2009 was gone in December 2010. The Nonesuch collection, so harmonically rich, sounded especially dreadful, a sonic mush. I stretched in silence.

  We did our best to make up for my silent days and nights with food and sights. We went to a cut-your-own tree farm and sawed down our own evergreen, savoring the clean, piney smell of the sawdust. We baked cookies and banana bread and made gumbo from an old Mississippi Gulf Coast recipe that takes two days prep and enough crustaceans to feed a seal colony. We went driving all over greater Athens in search of Christmas-decoration extravaganzas, houses outlined from roof peak to hedges in lights, manger scenes, and inflatable snowmen cheek to jowl. We went to a Christmas Eve service at an Episcopal church, a High Mass. The choir sounded like banshees to me, but the clergy were in splendid, full vestment, and the sanctuary was redolent of evergreen boughs and incense. I basked in the service’s beatific vibe.

  Under our tree on Christmas morning, I found several pairs of really cool socks. Argyle is the new jazz.

  Chapter 18

  Radiant Beams

  In mid-January, Marty and I drove four hours from Athens to Savannah so she could compete in the city’s annual American Traditions singing festival, an invitational, juried competition that demands contenders from all across the country to demonstrate their command of multiple genres, from Broadway show tunes to jazz, hymns, and Great American Songbook pop. The late, great tunesmith Johnny Mercer, a Savannah native, is sort of the patron saint of the competition. Marty had participated in 2009, made the semifinals, and come away with enough prize money to cover the cost of our three-day stay. She was determined to try again, not so much for cash possibility, but as an act of defiance, a refusal to let her cancer or my hearing issues dictate our everyday life.

  She was so determined, in fact, that she postponed the six weeks of post-op radiation therapy that, if her doctors and her sister Margaret had had their way, would have begun in late December. The radiation specialist had to twist her arm to get her to agree to the treatment at all. Since I was in no condition to be her second set of ears, Margaret had gone with her to the initial consultation. As a nurse, she advocated for the therapy. I did as well, but Marty was insistent.

  “I’m only Phase I,” she argued, “and my lymph nodes were clear.” She relented only after a telephone conversation with another of her sisters, Amy, who was battling a much more serious form of cancer.

  “If they missed a single cell,” Amy told her, “and if that cell is cancerous, and if it migrates, you’ll have to go through all this crap again. Think of this as insurance.”

  Amy, who lives near Omaha, had gone through gut-wrenching chemotherapy treatments. She’s tough stuff and hard to argue with. Plus, she and several other cancer survivors who counseled Marty said that radiation, compared to chemo, was a walk in, well, if not the park, a transitional neighborhood.

  Still, it was sing first, get radiated later. We stayed at a friend’s condo on Tybee Island and commuted back and forth to the singing competition, the opening rounds of which were held in the sanctuary of a grand old church in Savannah’s historic district. Sitting in a front pew, I could hear “sound” as the singers took their turns at the microphone, but without the printed program that told me this barrel-chested guy was performing “Some Enchanted Evening” or that perky woman was singing “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” I hadn’t a clue what was coming out of their mouths. I focused on body language.

  At least I could imagine what Marty was singing and fill in some blanks, since I knew her repertoire and her animated delivery so well. On the strength of bravura and crowd-pleasing renditions of “Fever” and “Amazing Grace,” she once again made it to the semifinals, but also again, no further. She wasn’t disappointed. The American Traditions competition is fierce. Many of the contestants are conservatory and university voice professors. She had gotten up on stage and sung her heart out less than three months after undergoing cancer surgery. It was good for her, good for us. Once she was out of the running, we explored more of the old city, took chilly walks on the beach at Tybee, and pretended we were just another off-season vacationing couple, all expenses paid.

  Her radiation treatments began almost as soon as we returned to Athens. I wanted to drive her to and from, and several friends offered as well, but here again she was determined to be self-reliant. The Northeast Georgia Cancer Center was only a few miles from our house, and her treatments—one a day, Monday through Friday, for six weeks—proved not to be nauseating. Nor were they exhausting, at least not initially. She maintained a mile-a-day walking schedule at first. By the fifth week, she was sleeping a lot—early to bed, late to rise, with naps in between.

  She invited me to her final session, not only to witness the therapy, but to meet staff and fellow patients. People fighting cancer tend to bond, she had told me, women especially. As I shook hands and nodded to acknowledge names I pretended to understand, the camaraderie, fondness even, was unmistakable and touching.

  I was invited into the shielded booth to observe. Marty entered the treatment area in a thin, striped gown. A nurse positioned her on a narrow, metal table, then joined me and the radiologist behind the glass. The L-shaped machine that hovered above her looked like the armature of a giant, stainless steel Kitchen Aid mixer. Marty closed her eyes as the room darkened. The table slowly rose, lifting her like a sacrificial offering. If there was whirring, I couldn’t hear it, but for the next minute or so, red laser beams coming from several different angles above illuminated the area around her right breast. It was as if she were the besieged heroine of a science-fiction movie and I was an extra. I was more than impressed. I was wowed.

  Back in street clothes, in the lobby, she thanked the staff profusely, as did I. Outside, in the car, she told me they and her fellow patients had been incredible, kind, inspiring—and that she hoped she never saw them again unless it was at the grocery store or in line at the multiplex.

  Two weeks later, after promising the director she would let her know if she found herself tiring, Marty began rehearsals for Alice, a Rose of Athens Theater musical based on Alice in Wonderland. She had composed songs and would conduct a vocal orchestra formed by the cast. Life at home was starting to feel almost normal. Almost.

  Chapter 19

  Dancing in the Dark

  Our love life took a decided downturn after our respective surgeries. We might have been headed for a crystal-anniversary
slump under normal circumstances, but Marty’s surgery and my hearing problems dealt us a double hit. Physical intimacy was infrequent, and when she did feel like being lovers, it was odd—and I don’t mean kinky.

  There’s an old joke about sex with a condom being like taking a shower wearing a raincoat. Sex without hearing is like going to a concert wearing a space helmet.

  Imagining sex without sight isn’t difficult. Some people actually prefer to do it under cover of darkness, and most everybody closes his or her eyes some of the time during erotic activity. It can actually be an aphrodisiac to deprive yourself of vision. It can heighten your other senses, increase the feeling of being lost, of abandon.

  We were well aware of the drawbacks to my wearing my hearing aid while making love. If anything got too close to that ear—a nose, a hand, a foot, whatever—the hearing aid let out a yelp that’s audible, and not just to me. There’s nothing like a squealing hearing aid to spoil a mood. Well, other than a squalling baby, perhaps. Ear nibbling, something I have enjoyed since I first experienced it as a spin-the-bottle teen, is a guaranteed squealer. And the same goes for sweet nothings, words of love. Even whispered soft and true, they set off the aid.

  Sex without even one good ear is an even greater challenge. Marty told me one of the most lamentable effects of my hearing loss on our love life was its restriction of “pillow talk,” before or after. Words and sounds are essential aspects of foreplay, but if I lie next to her on my left side, I lose half my hearing, and the aid yips like a Chihuahua. If I lie next to her on my right side, I lose half my hearing, and the implant processor, though she can’t hear it, rubs on the pillow any time I move in the slightest and makes a sound like crinkling paper. And as buzz kills go, responding, “What? Say that again,” to a murmured affection or a spontaneous request for more of this or that is on par with hearing aid feedback.