It's not that I've been neglecting this blog, but oftentimes life just plugs along in an uneventful litany of days and weeks and months. You sleep. You rise. You eat. You wash the laundry. You pet the dog. Notoriously boring stuff to blog about.
Then you visit your otologist for your yearly checkup.
Living with hearing loss, and the potential of future losses, the annual audiogram and doctor visit is the reminder of how easily something you have can be suddenly lost. Again.
"So, tell me how you're doing?" he begins.
"I'm good," I reply. "How 'bout that audiogram?"
"It's stable," he says. I already knew that. My audiologist already told me so. Then he goes on about missing the Meniere's conference this year as he checks my ears.
I inject that the coil on my CI has been giving me headaches and that the coil spacer the audiologist gave me has only made it slightly better. He checks my scalp for bumps and sores. He checks my mandibular joint for TMJ, and taps on the occipital nerve for soreness. Finding none, he tells me I should turn the coil magnet out as far as it will go.
"I've done that already," I tell him. He turns it anyway. Then he tells me a story about how watching my salt intake will reduce my risk of losing more hearing in my better ear and quotes some kind of research he learned about at the Meniere's conference last year. I think he's deflecting.
"I bought a cabin in Colorado and plan to move in a year or so. I'm looking for a CI clinic there," I tell him. He asks where and tells me I should go to a clinic in Denver where Cochlear has their headquarters. It's too far, so he recommends a CI doctor a few hours closer.
"You are doing really well with your CI," he says, inspecting my audiogram carefully. "One of my best successes."
"I complain a lot about the quality of the sound," I say, "but I know I'm really successful with it."
"I want to see you again in 6 months," he says.
"Not a year this time?" I ask.
"I want to see if turning the magnet out helps the headache," he says. I remind him that I've already tried that. "You could try a Tylenol," he advises.
Then I ask for a copy of my audiogram and leave.
I inspect my new audiogram and compare it with a past one from 4 years ago, after my sudden hearing loss episodes stabilized. I've saved photos of each report in my phone. I find that most of the levels are indeed stable, only moving down by 10dB in most of the frequencies, ranging from mild loss in the low frequencies to severe loss in the mid to high frequencies. What I didn't expect was the change in the presentation level of the word test. The previous audiogram presented words at 60dB. I scored 100% word recognition on the new audiogram but the volume now presented at 85dB. An indication that though my pure tones are somewhat stable, I now need much more volume to understand words.
It is the first time I have seen my CI results printed on the record sheet. My tones test was straight across at 30 dB, with the words "near full CI access" written across the grid. My words test was 88% at a presentation level of 65dB. I remember missing one word completely when I thought my audi said, "n'glif" and just shook my head. I don't know why missing words still embarrasses me. Understanding words without context is hard. I can clearly see from this audiogram how I can hear better with my CI than my other ear when unaided.
These visits always leave me a little depressed. This one was no different. Hearing loss really sucks.
But I heard a mother tell her young son at the appointment desk how proud she was of him for playing the games so well with the audiologist and she asked him if he wanted to get an ice cream on the way home. Yes. Ice cream. I would treat myself, too.
It was a cup of low-fat chocolate peanut butter cup yogurt with brownie sprinkles. And it made me feel a lot better emotionally. But my head still hurts.
