Road Apples
April 12, 2010

Ear-rational, ear-itating ears

By Tim Sanders

This week’s column concerns those funny-looking things on the side of your head. No, I’m not referring to the Post-It notes your wife sticks there before sending you to the grocery store; I mean your ears. If you’ll notice, people are always commenting on how so-and-so has a handsome brow, or a Roman nose, or piercing blue eyes, or a fine, manly chin. But you never hear: “Nelson has the best looking set of ears I’ve ever seen! They’re so manly and piercing, almost hypnotic.” That is because ears are purely functional, and unless you have ears the size of Frisbees with tufts of hair sprouting out, they go unnoticed.
And our ears continue to go unnoticed and underappreciated until they start to go bad. Nobody really knows why Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his left ear, put it in an envelope and gave it to a prostitute. It could be that he’d simply run out of cash, but I suspect there was frustration due to hearing loss involved, somehow. I say that because I have a lot of hearing loss, and at times it makes me feel just like cutting off a large portion of my right ear and mailing it to a prostitute. Or an IRS agent.

My hearing has been deteriorating for several years. My wife insists that it is all due to me spending a lot of my earlier years driving around with the volume turned up to STUN on the car radio, but I disagree. True, nowadays with all of that stupid, repetitive Snoop Cube, Ice Dog, 10 Cent hippity hop rap stuff blasting from every third car in the McDonald’s parking lot there may be a lot of resulting hearing loss, but not so when I was younger. No, back then we listened to more soothing, intellectually stimulating songs, like “Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp,” “Wooly Bully,” and “Long, Tall Sally.” You certainly can’t damage your ears listening to classics like those.

But the cause of my hearing loss is not important. What is important is that a recent fluid buildup in my right ear has made hearing anything at all out of that particular side of my head almost impossible. My left ear works, but only marginally. During conversations I miss a lot of what is being said, and often, rather than constantly annoying people with “HUHs” and “WHATs”, I have to fake it. I simply nod and smile when somebody says something. And when they look at me as though it’s my turn to respond, I play it safe. Sometimes the benign, nodding smile, accompanied by a cheerful but noncommittal “You said a mouthful there!” works just fine. Like, for example, when someone is telling me how much they appreciate the good weather we’ve had lately. Sometimes, however, when they’re on my right–the bad ear side–and are telling me about hitting their kitty with the riding mower this morning, that safe, noncommittal response makes no sense at all. If there’d ever been any doubt that I was an idiot, that ‘‘You said a mouthful there!” response to the doleful tale of a beloved, freshly mulched cat removes that doubt.

Another thing the loss of hearing in one ear accomplishes is to remove your sense of direction. That doesn’t mean you’ll walk into trees and wander through Walmart for days looking for the exit, it only means you’ll have what they call “monaural” hearing, which keeps you from determining where sounds are coming from. It is very unnerving to walk through my own house, which I know intimately, and hear my wife’s voice coming from somewhere, saying something she’s been saying a lot lately: “TIM, mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble.”

Hoping to clarify the mumbling, I say, very politely, with an apologetic tone, “I can’t hear you, where are you?” My game plan being to go wherever she is and turn my good ear toward her and ask her to repeat herself. Unfortunately, her response is usually “I’M IN HERE!”

That is no help, since I already know she is somewhere. “WHERE?” I ask.

I’m no fool. This time I listen carefully, and when she says “IN HERE!” again, I head directly for the bedroom closet and look into the shoe box which is where her voice seems to be coming from.

By the time she finds me, and we get her previous location (which was all the way on the other side of the house in the living room) all straightened out, she’s no longer in the living room, and has forgotten what she wanted in the first place.

Last week I visited an ENT specialist (only for the E part) at UAB. Before I saw the doctor, a nice young lady put me into a soundproof room and plugged a couple of earphones into my head. She went outside and watched me through a window while she asked me to repeat words which she first piped into one ear and then the other. They were mostly easy words, like “jump” and “tall” and “frog,” and I knew them all. Then she piped a series of squeaks, hums, chirps, buzzes and other pleasant livestock noises into my ears. The volume varied, and I was told to raise my hand when I heard the sounds. This resulted in me sitting motionless for what seemed an inordinate amount of time, until, as a little joke, she’d pipe the AIR RAID SIREN FROM HELL into my good ear, which made me jump from my chair, throw both hands in the air, and shout “HOLY CRAP!” After the hearing test, I asked her how I’d done. She said something that sounded a lot like “the tractor propels you,” which I finally interpreted as “the doctor will tell you.”
He did, and vacuumed my ears out and rooted around in there and finally gave me a prescription and threatened to poke a hole near or in my right eardrum to let the fluid out if the prescription didn’t work. He assured me it would only be a small hole.

At least I think that’s what he said. It’s hard to hear anything at all when the tractor is propelling you out the door.