Life Beyond Seventy

Things can happen when you are least expecting them! They can happen spontaneously and can be life changing. You can be vomiting profusely and forcefully, spraying the walls as well as the toilet bowl, even though your head is inside the bowl when you feel a loud “pop” in your ear and, instantly it registers that you have just lost all hearing in that ear. And in your “good” ear. The other one had already lost at least half it’s ability to make sense of sound.

So you think that your ability to make conversation has been suddenly compromised. It has – in a very dramatic way – and much more. You take both ears back to the audiologist and she gives you the usual hearing test and shows you the results on a graph and you can see the difference. You can see that the two ears hear something very different now – and they hear something very different from each other. The audiologist recalibrates your hearing aids and that is great because it means that instead of being able to turn some of the sounds into words, and words into understanding you can now make out seventy percent of what you hear – which means that you can make sense of what others are saying, even if you don’t understand everything.

In order to turn the sounds into understanding you need to concentrate because you have to interpret in exactly the way that you do when you are listening to someone speaking a “foreign” language – you listen intently to the words and try to recognise and then “translate” them and then you have to “fill in the gaps” so that what you have heard you now comprehend. All that added concentration leaves you very weary after, say, a four hour session in which the conversation has taken place. You need to rest and recuperate. 

It is the same when you watch a program on TV, even when it is presented in the language with which you are familiar. That’s when you come to realise that it’s actually easier to use the subtitles – but you find out that you can’t read as fast as you can hear and that you can’t always keep up with what has been said, and in the process you concentrate more on the subtitles than on the vision. It requires exactly the same energy to watch a movie in a foreign language as to watch one in your “own” language. Watching TV becomes an arduous process, not relaxing. HOWEVER, these are merely the apparent effects of reduced hearing. The insidious effects are far more difficult to cope with – you realise that something far more sinister has occurred. 

Your inability to instantly comprehend what is happening around you actually transforms your reality – while it appears as though you are sharing your environment with those around you, in actual fact you are experiencing a different reality – others are part of the scene but you sense that what you feel is NOT what they feel – you are on a slightly different wave-length, a slightly different frequency. It is a little bit like watching a movie. You are sharing what is happening but you know that you are not completely participating. I wonder whether that’s what we experience after death – where our soul remains in this world but, because we don’t have a body, no-one can see us and consequently we are not included in the action.