The Secret Deafie: My elderly mother is going deaf but won’t admit it

The Secret Deafie is a regular column about deaf experiences submitted anonymously by different contributors. Read past articles here. If you have a story you’d like to tell, just email thelimpingchicken@gmail.com

I can’t put my finger on the first time I realised that my mother struggles to hear. 

After all, it’s one of those things which creeps up without warning, incrementally and invidiously. 

At first, it was almost a joke. If I’m honest, she hasn’t always been the loudest participant in family conversations anyway, despite having been the glue that’s held us together for so many decades. 

Anyway. Over the last few years, the issue has become more and more noticeable, the number of things we have to repeat growing with each visit home.

I’ve tried approaching it as something of a joke, light-hearted, even though, of course, it’s anything but funny. But along with the gentle ribbing, I have tried persuading her to take action.

If anything, Mum deserves credit for the sheer variety of excuses she has come up with for doing nothing, the creativity involved. The ‘reasons’ are as follows: 

• She is too busy (this is not in any way true) 
• She can’t get through to the doctors’ surgery on the phone (here she may have a point, and whether she’d be able to hear even if she did get through is another matter entirely, although I think, remarkably, she is still able to make/take some calls) 
• I should mind my own business (unusually for her, this last point was snapped)
• She does not need to do anything because ‘I’m not deaf, you know’ (definitely a whopper)
• ‘Well, everything starts to go wrong at my age’ (not sure what to say to that one, frankly) 

For various family health-related reasons, I have seen more of my mother than usual in recent months. And so Mum’s hearing loss has been more acutely noticeable than it might have been otherwise. 

I was sitting with my brother and father at home recently when Dad brought up the subject while Mum was out of the room, as he went through a typically highly organised list of Matters for Discussion. 

Oddly, though, the question was addressed to my brother and not to me. Ahem. Now. I may leave filing my tax return to the last minute. I may be a useless cook, inveterate over-sleeper and a miserably failed Couch 25K runner. I may be terrible (or great) at spilling hot drinks all over my laptop. 

But I do know a thing or two about not being able to hear. Having improbably got through university with no hearing aids, I had worn them for the best part of 30 years before having a CI fitted last winter. I so badly want to help. 

Of course, I’ve wondered as to the reasons behind the reluctance to act. It’s certainly not laziness. But it could be fear of a confirmed diagnosis, a dread of being told she needs hearing aids. 

(When I told her on the phone, tearfully, barely a year out of university, that I’d need them myself, her initial response was that, well, they would not do very much for my looks. I  can’t, hand on heart, say it was the most helpful of reactions.)

It could also be that understandably she dreads confirmation of old age. Of things, in her words ‘starting to go wrong’. 

I have, in my desperation, said that the problem could be the easily solvable one of earwax. I know this seems unlikely, but, hell, at this point I’ll try anything.

Yet still she refuses to seek help, beyond vaguely suggesting she could perhaps try SpecSavers ‘at some point’. (What, exactly, is wrong with the NHS, anyway?) 

Talking of which, when I happened to mention this matter to my own (NHS, obviously) audiologist, back in the before times, when I still wore hearing aids, devices which now seem positively prehistoric to me, he only confirmed what I already knew. Short of drugging my mother, bundling her in a car and physically taking her to a doctor’s surgery, there really wasn’t anything I could do. 

But it is frustrating. How can it not be, when I know only too well, from my own experience, just how much difference seeking help can make. How transformative hearing aids can be. That there is not the slightest need to feel the tiniest smidgeon of embarrassment. And I know exactly what the isolation of hearing loss can be like. She may at some stage have to face the reality of living on her own, when being able to hear things, from the doorbell to the phone, even having the radio or TV for company, will obviously become far more important. So of course it makes sound sense to seek help now, while the loss is still relatively mild. 

I guess I will just have to speak up (but not too loudly), and more clearly. Just as I have been telling others to do with me for decades. Until she changes her mind, and is ready to seek help.