As someone with a lifelong hearing deficiency, my day-to-day reality is akin to having an auto-correct in my head jumbling the words of other people, often with humorous effect. Though everyone has trouble with such things as song lyrics — mishearing "Rock the Casbah" as "rock the cat box," such mix-ups are no laughing matter when contending with everyday conversation.
Each May, the Gaithersburg, Md.-based American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) assists audiologists and speech-language pathologists in educating the 36 million American adults and a rapidly rising number of young people who are confronting hearing loss on how to recognize and cope with the affliction.
According to the ASHA, the ways in which people acquire a hearing deficiency are varied, including: genetics, aging, exposure to noise, illness, chemicals and physical trauma. I came into it as a small child via persistent ear infections brought on by an allergic reaction to the acrid haze of cigarette smoke at home.
Though in later years I was as culpable as everyone else in my age group for cranking the volume up on Led Zeppelin, I'm especially dismayed by today's young people with their omnipresent ear buds blasting dangerously loud music only millimeters from their eardrums. This is also a generation coming of age believing that a 90-decibel restaurant ambience is the normal and agreed-upon threshold for a happening place.
Restaurant owners have taken notice, and the decibel meter is now as standard equipment for food critics as is a discerning palate.
For those of us with challenged hearing, however, entering a busy establishment with concrete floors, bare walls, uncovered tables and a noise level that's the equivalent of a throttled-up gas lawn mower brings the promise of an evening of ringing ears, a hoarse throat and the feeling that I've been pounded by a meat mallet.
The ambiguity associated with not being able to hear with clarity also brings about psychological discomfort, including a constant fretting over not knowing if one has just been asked a question. In less-than-ideal acoustic settings, I end up devoting more mental energies to maintaining the pretense of following along with a conversation than I do in enjoying in the actual discussion.
For many people, the inability to adequately process spoken communication can be extremely isolating. As someone who makes his living by interviewing people, I can ill afford to avoid conversational settings, though sometimes I do shy away from circumstances in which I'll have to deliberate with difficult-to-understand individuals out of fear that I will mistakenly agree to wearing a puffy shirt or volunteer to help them move.
