With summer winding down, I find it is time for my back-to-school tune-up. Yesterday, that meant a message by a student at the message school behind the St. Louis Park post office. Today, it was a trip to a new audiologist, now part of the MN Eye Clinic where I have been going for eye exams the last few years. My former audiologist, the one who got me using digital hearing aids and who helped me get Gracie, moved to a new job. Her replacement, while certainly a nice person, did not seem to have the same level of experimental zest as her predecessor. That's why, when my eye doctor told me about the new hearing division, I thought I would check it out. Gracie came with me, and so did Bruce. In fact, when I made the appointment, they told me that I should bring a person I was used to listening to along with me for the hearing test. I was pretty excited about that idea. As it turned out, however, all Bruce did was listen to the audiologist and ask a few questions. He also committed to nagging me about wearing my hearing aids all the time after we listened to a lecture about a portion of the brain not engaging in listening atrophying...and possibly encouraging the onset of Alzheimer's. My former audiologist, whom I liked a lot, really said the same thing about needing to wear hearing aids all the time to train the brain to ignore unessential sounds. None of this was new. But it was still depressing...as was my hearing test. Apparently I hear well enough to be able to understand better with the help of hearing aids BUT my brain is just not functioning well enough to accept the amplification and interpret it. There might be a new hearing aide designed for just this, and I said I would test it...maybe next week or the week after. However, I feel a bit like my bean plants, now gnawed on by the darn Japanese beetles. How much of an effort should I put into saving those beans when the end of summer is rushing toward us like a runaway frieght train?
Gracie was very excited to ride in the car. She wasn't very happy in the doctor's office though. I decided she was either concerned that we were there to have something looked at or done to her, or she could hear all the high pitched sounds that were painful to even my low functioning ears and didn't like any more than I did. Oddly, the audiologist had never heard of a hearing dog and actully said, "Service dogs are mostly for the visually impaired." That leaves me a tiny bit hopeful that he didn't know what he was talking about...a tiny bit. I don't know why I always hope that someone will say, "I see the problem. I'll just do this and then it will be fixed' when I go in to have my hearing checked instead of saying, "Your hearing loss is profound." I know profound means something special when applied to hearing loss, something more than just "profound." I still hate hearing it. I'm sure glad I have Gracie here--happy to be home just as I am--to comfort me. So, from something bad--hearing loss--comes something good--Gracie.
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