I should not have decided to go ahead and host our biweekly board gaming night so soon after this hearing loss happened to me. While I love my friends and I was happy to see them, it was a little bit too much for me.

I can’t adequately describe how horrendous my hearing situation is right now. In a quiet setting, it’s bearable; there’s some tinnitus (a low, constant humming sound) but that’s basically white noise. With my hearing aid in, I can hear many of the normal background sounds — water running, Ray puttering around, the microwave beeping, horns honking, the keys on our keyboards clicking — and none of those are a problem. (Without the hearing aid…well, I hear a lot less, though not nothing.) I can have a conversation with Ray as long as he’s either very close to my ear or wearing the microphone that streams directly into my hearing aid.

Tonight was the first time I’ve been in a noisy setting since this happened. I have the microphone, so I was hoping that would help, and it did — as long as there wasn’t too much other noise in the room…which was almost never, since we had something like 10-12 people over. I put the microphone in Surround mode in the middle of the gaming table so I could hear everyone, but the result was both way too loud and still incomprehensible — not unlike being at a concert where the volume is so loud that all the sound is distorted. It was like listening to a dozen people through a badly-tuned, loud CB radio. It was maddening and exhausting and if this is my new normal, I am going to have to avoid social gatherings in the future. Every time someone laughed or made a loud exclamation during our game, I thought my head was going to explode…but if I turned the volume down, I couldn’t understand a word. And if someone was trying to talk to me, if there was even one other person talking nearby, I could not understand a word, even if they were using the microphone.

I will discuss all this with the doctor and audiologist on Monday, but I have no idea if there’s anything that can be done. I am terrified that this is how I’m going to have to live from now on.

I feel like I should rename this blog, considering how much it’s derailed from the original topic, but I don’t know what else to call it. There will be more about my cochlear implant here once it’s activated, but for right now the all-consuming thing is this new and unexpected hearing loss episode that has me reeling.