A CHANGE OF COURSE

“If I hadn't lost my hearing, I wouldn't be where I am now. It forced me to maximise my own potential. I have to be better than the average person to succeed.”

~  Lou Ferrigno  ~

As I was now under the care of the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital in London there was no longer the reassurance of someone nearer to home if things got difficult.

Why was it a Throat Nose and Ear hospital?  
Everywhere else in the UK was Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT)! They had an ENT department!
I had to find out, it was awkward to say and I wondered if it was a long established spelling mistake. Perhaps the masons had already carved the mistake in the stone over the front door so it couldn't be corrected before somebody noticed! 
The reason was all in their history.

I was now a patient on a waiting list like everyone else in the system and subject to anonymous bureaucracy that insisted on phone calls to ask for or arrange things and ‘private & confidential’ meant they wouldn’t give out personal information to second parties i.e. my wife, who had now become my secretary for all things in communication. I was beginning to see how bad it could be out there as a disabled person in a world of indifference and impersonal dealings.

Otherwise it was the Audiology Department that kept me functioning, as they could now provide me with replacement digital hearing aids and services when it became necessary. The problem was that nothing new was powerful enough for me. My audiogram was off the page in the high frequency range, I needed clarity rather than volume to understand speech. All else was distracting noise.

Its possible to make out the words ". .m . d..f p.rs.n" but I didn't have the high frequency consonants, only the low frequency vowels. So to me that would come out as "i a. a .ea. .e..o." and that is unintelligible. Extreme concentration was giving me headaches and mental exhaustion. I would sleep for a couple of hours each evening after I got home.

When my audiology needs were also taken over in London, I found that my friendly local department that had been on the corridor above me and I had taken for granted for so many years, no longer knew me as a colleague. The hospital equivalent of the GP’s receptionist keeping everyone at bay was a barrier now rather than a friendly understanding face. I had to wait four months for an appointment each time too go back to London rather than wait just a few days and walk down the street.

As it is for Healthservice patients in general, what was urgent for me personally and also to help me continue working safely and effectively in that same Healthservice, became just another problem in their queue.

And I could see this was going to get worse! 
Work was important to me, I wasn't yet financially secure for retirement.
How much longer could I do it competently?
When would the muttering start about my efficiency?

I was lucky to have some very supportive colleagues who knew me well but I was still stubbornly trying to be the same old person and do my share. It was personal, it was me and I felt it deeply. I wanted to be someone I could not. Someone I used to be.

When it came to my assessments for the implant I was asked how my deafness affected me. How would an implant make me feel? I think I overdid the desire to work part, that for me, was to be normal again, the way I saw it. That was the wrong answer! I knew the technical stuff of how it worked and how it was implanted but not the psychological part. How it would help me as a person and what its limits were. I should have read more about it. When it is listed in front of you the recognition that 'this is you' can be very depressing.

A cochlear implant will not make hearing normal. It may mimic a normal process but the result is not the same nor can anyone explain how it sounds to them because we don't share precisely the same perceptions. 

We are all unique.