Coping With Hearing Loss

Oddly enough, I've come to think that my hearing loss was one of the best things that ever happened to me, as it led to the publication of my first novel. But it took a while for me to accept that I was losing my hearing and needed to do something about it.

I was born with a mild hearing loss but began to lose more of my hearing when I was a senior in college. One day while sitting in my college dormitory room reading, I noticed my roommate get up from her bed, go to the princess telephone in our room, pick it up and start talking. None of that would have seemed strange, except for one thing: I never heard the telephone ring! I wondered why I couldn't hear a phone that I could hear just the day before. But I was too baffled--and embarrassed--to say anything to my roommate or anyone else.

Unbeknown to me at the time, that was only the beginning of my downward spiral, as my hearing grew progressively worse. But I was young and still vain enough not to want to buy a hearing aid. I struggled through college by sitting up front in the classroom, straining to read lips and asking people to speak up, sometimes again and again.

By the time I entered graduate school, I knew I could no longer put it off. I had to purchase a hearing aid. By that time my hearing loss was such that even sitting in front of the classroom wasn't helping much. I was still vain enough to wait a few months while I let my hair grow out a bit before taking the plunge but I eventually I did buy a hearing aid. It was a big, clunky thing, but I knew that I would have to be able to hear if I ever wanted to graduate.

Soon, my hair length didn't matter much, as hearing aids got smaller and smaller. They also got better and better at picking up sound. The early hearing aids were analog devices and not programmable. They did little more than make sounds louder evenly across the board. That doesn't work for most of us with nerve deafness, as we may have more hearing loss in the higher frequencies. The newer programmable digital hearing aids go a long way toward improving on that. They can be set to match different types of hearing loss, so you can, say, increase a particular high frequency more than the lower ones.

Once I bought my first hearing aid and was able to hear again, I could focus on other things that were important to me--like my education, my career and writing that first novel! I didn't realize it then, but that first hearing aid actually freed me to go on to bigger and better things despite having a hearing loss.

I had long dreamed of writing a novel, but like others kept putting it off. As my hearing loss grew worse, it was a chore just to keep up at work, let alone do much else. Then once I got the hearing aid, I no longer had to worry about a lot of the things I did before, and I began to think that writing a novel would be the perfect hobby for me. Anyone can write regardless of whether they can hear. I was also determined to prove that losing my hearing would not hold me back.

My first novel was published in 1994 and my fifth in the summer of 2005. Writing turned out to be much more than a hobby, as I've been writing full-time for more than 10 years. I'm now hard at work on my first nonfiction work, a photo-essay book to be published by Bulfinch, a division of Time Warner Books, in 2007.

I honestly believe that I would never have sat down at the computer and banged out that first novel if I hadn't lost so much of my hearing. Instead, I'd probably still be an editor somewhere and still dreaming about someday becoming a novelist. That's why I sometimes think that my hearing loss was one of the best things that ever happened to me.