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This is a nice summation of how frequency deafness behaves.
I have other fun things going on with my hearing. Tinnitus and misophonia make it extra fun.
"It's quiet. Too quiet." is something that I encounter.
Often times the goal is to hit that "noise soup" point so the discrete sounds that are triggering the misophonia are lost in the cacophony.
It's why I can often handle eating in a restaurant with friends and being utterly unable to stand the experience of their mastication at home. It's especially bad when I'm not eating at the same time.
I've tried to explain it, over and over, but nobody seems to listen.
That leads me to think that they're doing it on purpose, just to torment me.
Or they just don't care.
Even more fun is realizing that it can make me hard to be around because the people who are making an effort to not set off the problem have to MAKE that extra effort with me and nobody else they know.
I tend to withdraw.
Somewhere along the line, some connection in my little pea-brain got fried and I started getting anxiety attacks. It took forever to identify them.
I already trended down the introvert spectrum before I caught aversion to settings where I would be subject to eating noises and now I also get anxiety when I anticipate facing those noises in settings where I know there will be no covering white or pink noise.
If you really want to see me freak out: Remove my ability to escape by controlling the transportation THEN ignore my desperate pleas to leave. Triple word score if you order lunch and eat it in front of me while I'm in the "must remove myself" panic attack.
I feel yer pain, bro. In a quiet room or outside I can carry on a normal conversation with no problem. In a crowd or noisy area, forget it, all static. Text me I guess. I can use lip reading to supplement being hard of hearing, but that took a giant crap when everyone was wearing a face diaper. No mask of oppression mandates is so much better for me. I wear hearing protection any time I am in any kind of noisy environment. When people ask me why I tell them I am trying to preserve what little I have left.
ReplyDeleteI fried my hearing by years of high decibel pounding hard rock music. The never-ending hiss of tinnitus is my constant companion. On a hearing test I am 65% in one ear and 50% in the other. I am contemplating hearing aids but they aren't cheap.
Deafness is the only "handicap" where it is acceptable to berate the person suffering from it.
Well, I finally found someone that explained what I've been going through for the last 10 years (you did it with those cartoons). I started wearing hearing aids about 6 years ago, with the hope of correcting the problem. They boost all the frequencies that my hearing test said had "declined".......they don't really work.
ReplyDeleteI've had them "adjusted" several times, including new software that I can use to fine tune them on my Iphone: it doesn't really help much. The description in your cartoons is spot on: I can actually hear sounds my wife can't pick up, but she can hear a conversation just fine, while I can't.
I if turn the volume up enough to hear speech comfortably, Its too loud, and I end up with a massive headache in just a couple of hours.
Funny thing: I can hear speech in old black and white movies just fine, any new films, speech is just a jumble of noise.
Thanks for that cartoon post, I'm saving it to show family and friends.
I'm getting to the point where I lose speech in the background noise. I didn't realize how bad my hearing was getting until one day I noticed I could "hear" what people were saying when I could see their lips... but when they are masked, no bueno. I can't completely "read lips" if there is no sound at all like a TV on mute... but somehow my brain is filling in the gaps of what people are saying based on their lips. The past couple years has made things more frustrating. Seeing mask mandates go away is a very good thing for me.
ReplyDeleteFor me it is probably a lot that I've damaged my hearing from too much loud heavy metal music, shooting w/o adequate hearing protection and being around/driving cars with little to no mufflers for more than 40 years... But it is also partly genetic because my grandparents and parents have all suffered from some degree of hearing loss and mostly they didn't have at least all the same environmental damage factors.
My problem is that I can't hear well at all through background noise. I explain it to people by saying that my heaering's like a radio with the squelch control turned too low---speech and other things I need to hear are in the same frequency range as a lot of background racket (others' conversations, unnecessary piped-in music so I strain to hear what they're saying.
ReplyDeleteWhat others have said about lip reading and mask mandates. Add to that the stupid plexiglass shields for cashiers and pharmacy techs and it was a perfect storm of not being able to understand.
ReplyDeleteHigh levels of tinnitus. Joy. Loss of high frequency hearing so that many women's voices and most all children's voices are a shrill piercing assault of unrecognizable noise. Joy. Enough damage to inner ear that bone conducting doesn't work. Joy.
Even worse, I have to 'adjust' my hearing when someone starts talking to me. So I'll miss the first section but hear the rest. Which means either the person has to repeat what they say (which tends to annoy them) or I have to guess what they said. Which is why I repeat what I hear as a question.
Even worse, my wife knows I have hearing issues, and yet gets peeved at me when I don't hear her at all because I can't see her lips moving as she tends to face away from me (no, I am not that ugly, just the way she sits or lays due to body damage.)
And then there's the whole getting what they said wrong. I hear one thing which is not what they said. Not too bad with the outsiders, but thinking I heard something correctly when I didn't with the wife is not good.
Suck.
And then there's the fluctuating hearing loss due to allergies, bad allergies. Kind of sucky when your inner ear is all snotted up.
Thank you for that lovely image. I have loss in both ears, use hearing aids, have tinnitus and pretty much exactly the described issues with hearing other persons voice under the conditions listed.
ReplyDeleteMarried long time, cannot yet make wife understand that speaking at me (not the windshield or the side window) would help with intelligibility under road conditions. And a bar or restaurant? Please, absolutely impossible unless I get a good handle on lip reading to enhance understanding.