Appointments

Last year, I saw five different specialists during the course of the year. Now I'm adding another: an ear/nose/throat doc. I don't know if I'm just becoming more self-conscious about asking people to repeat themselves, or whether I actually am making that request more often than usual. Either way, as I haven't had a hearing test since age 12, I decided that I'm long, LONG overdue to have my hearing checked. 35 years is, to put it mildly, rather too long to go between exams, particularly for a person with a family history of early-onset hearing loss.

My biggest concern is whether I'm losing clarity, not just volume. That's what my dad is dealing with: he has nerve deafness, which not only causes decibel loss, but garbles what he CAN hear somewhat. There's no fix for THAT. Hearing aids can amplify the sound, but there's nothing that will get the sound clearer when the sound distortion is happening with the ear itself.

But there's no sense borrowing trouble. I get numerous phone calls in a given week, and I'm not necessarily noticing my problems getting worse when I haven't got lipreading to rely on. So even if my hearing clarity turns out to be impaired, it can't be THAT bad yet or I'd be having a far worse time using the phone.

In any event, it's well past time to establish the state of my ears via a baseline hearing test. Once I do this, when I get going with regularly scheduled tests, we'll have a basis of comparison to see what, if anything, has changed from one test to the next.