Life After Deaf

by Noel Holston

  Anyway, she vows to correct the error and notify the creditors. Two weeks later, I start getting second notices. There’s mention of collection agencies.

  I get back on the CapTel with BCBS. An agent named Michelle is apologetic. She swears she’ll straighten it out. She asks if she can put me on hold while she calls one of the creditors, LabCorp. And, once again, it gets curiouser and curiouser.

  I can hear the conversation. Or, rather, I can see the captions, a few seconds behind. The two customer reps are chattering away. I see the name Michelle popping up. I politely interrupt. “Excuse me, but are you both named Michelle?” The captions indicate “yes”es.

  I say, “Would you mind identifying yourselves before speaking as Michelle 1 and Michelle 2?”

  One of the Michelles says, “That would be kind of awkward.” And I say, “Well, not nearly as awkward as me trying to figure out which one of you is which from captions.”

  Michelle 1 assures me that the LabCorp bill is taken care of and that she will notify the other creditors of the Medicare mix-up. And she asks if there’s anything else she can do for me.

  I say, actually, yes, there is. When this call began, BCBS’s automated system notified me that it was being recorded. I tell her I’m a professional journalist and that I’m writing a book about my hearing-loss adventure. I tell her it would be helpful to have that recording so I can quote everybody correctly.

  After a long pause, I read the caption of her saying, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  That was four weeks ago.

  I am still waiting for my copy of the recording.

  I’m not upset, though. I’m a patient man as you can see. I’ve retained a sense of humor about all this. And I’m an optimist.

  I have every confidence that one day soon that recording will be delivered to my doorstep.

  By a white rabbit.

  A white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and carrying a pocket watch, a blue cross, and a blue shield.

  The audience rewarded my tale with sustained, enthusiastic applause. They may have been clapping for my perseverance rather than my skill as a monologist, but whatever the case, it felt good.

  Chapter 33

  Back to Life

  Not only was I now able to hear big noises, but, as 2013 moved into its second half, I was hearing small sounds better, as well. All the work I had previously done—the ah-bah, ah-sha practices and the speech therapy—had some carryover. My period of adjustment was shorter the second time around and my learning curve less steep. If the new implant was not the complete fix that Marty and I and the doctors had hoped for, it was unquestionably an improvement over the original.

  My awareness of sound in general was the best it had been since before my hearing crash—possibly the best it had been eight or ten years before that. Hearing loss can creep up on you so slowly and stealthily, you don’t even know it’s happening. It not like fading sight, when print becomes obviously indecipherable. With my implant tuned to a wide-radius setting, I had little problem sensing a wider world around me. The crunch of gravel under my shoes still rang true and bracing. In summer, I could park myself in a chair on our deck and be surrounded by the insect symphonics in the woods behind our house. In fall, Marty and I would race off like tornado chasers when we saw murmurations of starlings or blackbirds developing. We’d find spots to park where the birds swirled above us like M.C. Escher drawings come to life and enveloped us in a chirping canopy of sound.

  I also began to find music to supplement the treasury in my head. By testing CDs one by one, I realized percussive music was my best bet. Planet Drum, an album by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, jumped to the top of my in-car Top Ten. So did a CD I picked up at a used-record store by an African percussionist named Odo Addy. I discovered I could still appreciate Bach on Wood, an LP of classical chestnuts played on xylophone and marimba that I’d long had. I borrowed a CD of Balinese gamelan music from the local public library and found that, in all its bonging, clanging dissonance, it sounded almost identical to what I remembered it sounding like to my natural ears. And I got a wonderful surprise when I played Exotica, a best-of CD by Martin Denny, a pianist-arranger whose combo’s blend of light jazz and Hawaiian music from the early 1960s had been rediscovered and reclassified “lounge” in the nineties and early 2000s. My bionic ear didn’t hear it true, but its kitschy amalgam of congas, bongos, vibes, piano, and jungle sounds—faux parrots, monkeys, and such—still sounded wonderful.

  My ability to hear radio, a favored source of news and information, also improved, although with limits. The best place for me to listen was in the car, windows up, sitting still. Just starting the car diminished my comprehension, however, and driving, even slowly, masked more of what was being said. The problem is, like most people, I didn’t typically sit still and listen intently. Listening to the radio is something we do casually, out of the “corner” of our ear, while focusing on driving. Or at home while making breakfast or sweeping or sewing. That sort of multitasking was still not an option for me.

  Conversationally, I still struggled in even moderately noisy environments, and PA-amplified sound at meetings or speeches was mush to my ears. But one-on-one conversation was decidedly more comprehensible, especially in low-noise environments.

  To maximize home conversation—and lessen aggravation for Marty—I finally gave in to Marty’s pleas and tossed my home-decorating aesthetic to the wind. I assented to covering most of the hardwood flooring and ceramic tile in our house with thick carpet. We replaced some of the paintings and framed posters on the walls with fabric art. I did draw the line at her proposal to staple old egg cartons to the walls as makeshift sound absorbers. Utility has its limits.

  I also decided that I was overdue to take a formal course in American Sign Language, as my efforts to learn on my own from a book never amounted to much. I signed up for a night course in ASL through UGA’s office of continuing education.

  Like so many of my attempts to mediate my hearing difficulties, the class proved to be a bemusing boon. I discovered at the introductory class meeting that I was the only pupil who couldn’t hear well, not to mention being more than twice the age of the next-oldest students. Most were enrolled because they had aspirations to be interpreters. When the teacher on the first night surveyed us about our goals for the course—I had to have him come over and repeat the question for me—I pointed out my hearing devices and explained that my main objective was to stop driving my wife crazy.

  The course almost drove me up the wall. With my implant’s radius of hearing only a few feet, I often had difficulty understanding what the teacher said, and my classmates might as well have been mimes. The illustrations in the designated textbook were sometimes hard to decipher, and the demonstrations of various signs in the accompanying DVD were flashed so quickly, the way a lifelong, deaf signer would, that I would have to pause it and click through the signing frame by frame to make sense of them. One of the first words we learned to sign in class was “slow.” I found myself making the sign for “slow” at my TV set. Among other gestures.

  The book’s authors also had some odd priorities. Its cartoon-like drawings demonstrated how I would sign “She’s an expert surfer,” “He’s crazy about betting on the horses,” and “Have you ever been in an earthquake?” I searched in vain for illustrations of how to sign everyday essentials such as “lawn,” “pillow,” or “groceries.”

  Still, the ASL course imposed a discipline on me—and on Marty, who practiced with me daily. Once we had gotten down basic phrases—like “Toilet, where?” and “Hungry, you?”—and gotten accustomed to ASL’s unique syntax, we expanded our vocabulary with the help of a different, more diverse book titled The Joy of Signing. It was a big help, especially on mornings when my implant was inexplicably less effective. Plus, we learned profane signs from the Internet, great for arguments and any number of everyday frustrations.

  And in the spirit of leaving no option unexplored, I looked into a newly availab
le Bluetooth microphone, manufactured by ReSound, that was compatible with that company’s hearing aids and with Cochlear Americas implants. Cochlear Americas implant kits include a small mic, about the size of a thimble, on a three-foot wire. The other end has a prong meant to be plugged into a jack in the sound processor that sits on your pinna. Its purpose is to allow the person holding the mic to speak directly to the person with the processor, minimizing background sound in, say, a restaurant or at a ball game. I had such poor comprehension with my original implant that the microphone on the wire was next to useless. When I tried again after my revision surgery, I had better luck, but there was still the matter of being tethered to whoever was holding the mic. It made me feel rather like a dog on a leash, and a spontaneous move by either party could jerk my implant right off the side of my head.

  The ReSound mic, a wireless device, promised greater freedom, if nothing else. We had my cochlear audiologist, Cindy Gary, order one for me. When she taught me how to “pair” it with my processor and we began to practice, it was a revelation. Not only could I understand her almost as clearly as I could while conversing with her face-to-face from three feet away, but I still could understand when I moved out into the hallway, twenty to twenty-five feet away.

  On the drive home, Marty clipped the wireless mic to her seat belt, up near her chin, and we had what was for me the most intelligible conversation we’d had in a car in three years. Road noise typically masks so many words that we had often just given up and ridden in silence.

  We were having such a carefree give-and-take that we were distracted when we pulled up in front of our house at twilight. The rain we’d been trying to outrun started. Marty opened her door and popped her seat belt loose, spontaneously planning to make a run for our front porch. As the seat belt snappily retracted, it slingshot the Bluetooth out of the open door and into the downpour and the dark.

  Marty dashed to the house to grab an umbrella and a flashlight. I put the car in park where it sat idling, worried that I might back over my new toy. We quickly determined the mic was not in the gutter. Beyond the gutter was the expanse of English ivy that borders our front lawn. Marty held the umbrella over us while I, flashlight clenched between my teeth, crawled on my hands and knees, pulling apart the tangles of ivy and trying to spot a black Bluetooth about the size of a matchbook.

  Ten minutes and a thorough soaking later, we found it, and it wasn’t short-circuited by the rain. When I pulled it from between a cluster of ivy roots, I could hear it scrape—directly in my ear.

  From then on, I guarded my Bluetooth as though it were a money clip.

  Chapter 34

  Duluth

  Underlying the friction Marty and I had experienced after my hearing crashed was a simple reality: we spent too much time together—“joined at the hip,” as she put it. Everywhere she had lived, she had friends she could confide in. And I, like my father—and, apparently, like far too many men—invested almost exclusively in my wife. Our therapist agreed. We didn’t need to separate, we just needed some separate-ness.

  And lo and behold, out of the Northern Lights appeared a sign.

  One of the choreographers Marty had worked with at the Minneapolis Fringe Festival, Rebecca Katz, was on the faculty at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Just after Thanksgiving, she invited Marty to be an artist-in-residence. Rebecca would create one ballet around “Duluth,” a sort of new-age piano piece that Marty had composed, and another based on “Migration,” a prose poem inspired by flying Vs of geese Marty had seen the previous spring, the morning her father had passed away.

  Marty would be away for almost a month. In Duluth. In February. We had bid farewell to Minneapolis in 2001 largely because of our increasing intolerance of frigidity. Her willingness to go even farther north, to the icy north shore of Lake Superior no less, underscored not only her eagerness to pursue a deeply personal creative project, but also how badly we needed a break from each other.

  On the first of February, I saw her off on a flight from Atlanta and returned to a house empty save for our three cats.

  I had plenty to keep me occupied during the day, February being the beginning of the build-up to the Peabody Awards ceremony in May. And I relished my nighttime plans to catch up on movies Marty wasn’t keen on watching—horror flicks, superhero junk, violent crime dramas like The Departed and Pulp Fiction, and old westerns with Jimmy Stewart and Randolph Scott I had seen as a kid and wondered if they held up. I really appreciated Ride Lonesome.

  Not only did I make a concerted effort to not simply hole up with a stack of DVDs and binge-watch my way through the month, but I also made dinner dates with friends, hit the local museums and galleries, and went out to the movies.

  I arranged for my stepdaughter to come by once a week to check phone messages and tell me if I needed to call back with my CapTel. I made a similar arrangement with one of our nearby neighbors.

  Marty and I mostly kept in touch by text and email, but we made a point of not overmonitoring. I mean, what could happen?

  What, indeed. First, in the second week of the month, Athens was hit by a rare ice storm. There were limbs and whole trees down all over the county, and the hilly city’s famously steep streets were a slip-and-slide thrill ride for those who ventured out.

  And then, well, when I got up the morning of February 15 and checked my phone, there was a text from Marty: “Are you OK? How bad was the earthquake?”

  Earthquake? I logged on to my computer and called up the Athens Banner Herald web page. Sure enough, at about 10:30 the night before, soon after Marty and I had exchanged Valentine’s Day sweet talk and I had gone to sleep, north Georgia, including Athens, had experienced a rare quake, 4.1 on the Richter scale.

  After I had surveyed the house, I phoned Marty on the CapTel and told her except for the cats being unusually jumpy, everything seemed to be all right. The house wasn’t tilted any worse than usual, and no vases or curios had danced off their shelves as far as I could tell. After we ended the call, I pulled out the textbook from my ASL class and found the illustration for how to sign “Have you ever been in an earthquake?”

  On February 22, I got an email from Marty in which she raved about another artist-in-residence, a tap dancer from New York. I felt more than a twinge of jealousy. But she ended the email by saying, “I cannot WAIT to walk in the warmth with you. You make time for your lovely wife on Tuesday morning, ok? Maybe even go into work late? Hmmmmm? That would be nice. Loving the work. Past ready to be home.”

  I submitted a request the next morning for two days of vacation time.

  Epilogue

  To paraphrase a Grateful Dead song, what a weird, circuitous journey this turned out to be.

  My loss of hearing and efforts to recover as much of it as I could—all this monkey business—have been a profound learning experience, like nothing else in my life except perhaps becoming a parent.

  The first lesson I would share is that you, starting right now, should protect your ears like the precious, miraculous organs they are. Be unstintingly careful about the headphones you put over your ears and the earbuds you put in them; and use plugs at sports arenas, music clubs, and rallies and when out mowing the lawn or using a leaf blower. Don’t fire a weapon without ear protection. Don’t even vacuum the living room. There’s no guarantee that your hearing won’t fail someday for other reasons, as mine did, but it’s stupid to worsen your odds. Noise isn’t the only culprit we face, but it’s cochlear enemy number one.

  Whether you have a cochlear implant or just a hearing aid, kick your vanity to the curb. It’s true that some people may see you as diminished and some may think you’re less intelligent than you are, but far more will appreciate your honesty, respect your disability, and try to help you communicate. Shyness is likewise a characteristic you can’t afford. If you have trouble understanding a cashier at the drugstore or a sales rep at Best Buy or Old Navy, be proactive, tell them you have challenged ears. Tell them without apology. Make light of
it if you have to—even point to your device(s). It’s better to be up-front.

  If you find yourself longing to hear clear, effortlessly comprehensible sounds, remember you have other senses and that most likely you take them for granted, too. Make a point of paying more attention to your senses of touch, taste, and smell, not just for compensation, but for stimulation. And if you still have vision, look closely. There’s so much more to see.

  Nobody’s perfect. We’re all impaired, some way or other. It’s our natural state. Hearing loss is just one more limit we have to work around.

  Maintaining a sense of humor is crucial. I know, I know. Going deaf isn’t funny. Except when it is.

  Recognize that while the cochlear implant is a technological marvel, it isn’t foolproof, and its effectiveness varies from implantee to implantee.

  With these last two points especially in mind, I offer this last anecdote.

  * * *

  June 2014. Marty and I are on Cumberland, a sea island just off the South Georgia coast. We’ve taken a ferry across in the morning and hiked through a stunning canopy of live-oak branches, twisted as a cochlea, to the beach on the eastern side, pristine as far as the eye can see. I have a Widex hearing aid in my left ear, my Cochlear Americas processor sitting atop my right. The processor is paired with my ReSound wireless mic, which is hanging from its lanyard around Marty’s neck. We stay abreast of each other, walking, talking, and occasionally tossing in an ASL sign.

  After strolling down the outer beach for a mile and a half, we turn west toward the ferry docks and pass ruins of a Carnegie mansion as big as Downton Abbey. And we begin to see little herds of Cumberland’s famed wild horses, though feral or untamed is probably a more accurate term. They look sleek and healthy, like the domestic horses from which they are descended. Some resemble thoroughbreds.

  We come upon a particularly gorgeous pair, and Marty circles widely around them hoping to get a better photo, with the early afternoon light behind her. She exceeds the Bluetooth’s range, so I turn it off, hoping to hear the horses and the wild turkeys that range free on the island. Spotting some shade, I make my way to a crumbling stone wall about twenty-five yards from her. She’s taking pictures with her phone. I pull out our camera, thinking I will snap some neat shots of her snapping the horses.