Juliet England: The testing hearing test

I arrive at the hospital early. Someone after whom I am hankering ridiculously, against hope, reason and expectation, works here, in a department near Audiology. He has said he would try and pop out and say hello. He has my phone number. He does not text.

I sit in the café, an illicit Twirl bar melting over my fingers, flicking on my phone incessantly. You have no new messages. (Of course I don’t.)

When the appointed hour rolls round, I give up and present myself at Audiology. Unusually, I have not rocked up late, and am seen bang on time, and so I bounce in, fairly fizzing with good spirits, despite the lack of text messages.  

There are two women in the room, trainer and trainee. Based on their ages, I confuse which is which and end up making a ham-fisted non-joke of it.

The trainee has a thick Scottish burr. I love all accents, but hers is especially hard to follow.

“How do you cope in social situations?” she asks earnestly.

“Oh, I don’t have any friends,” I reply, unsmilingly but breezily. “So it’s not a problem.”

They have expressions of genuine alarm on their faces. I have to explain I was joking, which inevitably kills any attempts at humour stone dead.  

And so the questions continue. Some I catch, some I don’t, and have to be repeated.

Finally, I’m ushered into the soundproof booth. It’s airless, stifling in the heat, and so close it’s seriously uncomfortable. Since my earliest boarding school days, I have been a committed claustrophobe. I try and distract myself by thinking of all the most outrageous things I could do. Fart monstrously? Let them open the cabin to find me snoring? Stick drawing pins in my eyes?

The beeps come and go. I am bored, sleepy and irritable. How am I supposed to know when I’ve heard a beep? (I will later be told I often pressed the button when there was no beep.) Perhaps they really will come in to find I’ve nodded off.

Finally, the door opens and I can feel a little more air, breathe a bit more easily. I sit down with the trainer, who takes over proceedings as the trainee scuttles off.

She shows me the graph of my results on her machine. It shows clearly how much worse my hearing has got since the last time it was tested a couple of years before, especially in my left ear, and confirms my worst suspicions (and reason for booking the test), that I have been hearing less and less.

Suddenly, the humour has left the room, sucked out along with the oxygen.

Patiently, kindly the audiologist explains that there’s just one more hearing aid left for me to try, the most powerful the NHS can offer. After that, the only other option would be a cochlear implant. I think bleakly about this for a minute or two. Irreversible, major surgery that’s no miracle cure. A procedure that leaves you with a satellite dish clamped to the side of your head. (I pride myself on not being vain, on being a low-maintenance kind of chick, but my hair is my Achilles’ heel.)

Still, it’s a procedure which could change everything. How can I even start to make a decision like that?

The audiologist hands me a tissue. She makes the foam impressions for the new aids and says we can book another appointment, take things from there. And then there is nothing more to be said. I gather up my things and leave the windowless room.

Waiting at the bus stop, I watch as a bicycle swooshes past, along with all the other traffic. I can hear all that, I think, even the cyclist. Why is it so hard to distinguish speech, individual words?

I arrive at the train station, where I change buses. A middle-aged woman at the bus stop remarks on my t-shirt, advertising Much Ado about Nothing, a local open-air production in which I have a small part.

“We go every year,” she is saying. “Are you in it?”

I can’t hear.

“About ten to five,” I reply.

“No, no. Your t-shirt. Much Ado. We’re coming to see it. We do every year. Are you in it?”

“Five minutes. The bus should be here in five minutes.”

The lady is to be commended for her extraordinary patience.

“No, no. Your t-shirt. Much Ado. We’re coming to see it. We do every year. Are you in it?”

I am veering wildly off-piste now, about to reply “milk, no sugar, thanks” when the penny drops.

“Oh, you should have said,” I say. “Yes, just a small part. We open in a few weeks.”

Read more of Juliet’s articles for us here.

Juliet England does freelance social media and PR work for cSeeker.