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first person

You get on your hands and knees, Hugh McKechnie writes

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Like a lot of guys my age, my hearing is not what it used to be. I don't have too much trouble understanding if I'm face to face with the speaker, but if they turn away, I get stranded in mid-message. I frequently ask people to repeat what they said. They are usually nice about it, but they are also frequently exasperated.

At home, my wife, Annalee, wonders why the volume is set so high when I'm watching Don Cherry. Isn't he too loud even when he says nothing at all?

A while ago my daughter-in-law said something that I misunderstood completely. It was one of those confidential moments where your response is valued. I thought I was in the ball park, so I took a chance and replied to what I thought she had said. The look I got said it all. Was I clueless?

There is only an inch separating the deaf from the idiot when you fake an answer to an unknown question. Do it twice and your credibility takes a serious hit. So, I decided to make an appointment with a leading purveyor of hearing devices.

With my gold card in one hand and skepticism in the other, I arrived at the store. The audiologist did a booth-and-button test. I sat in a soundproof booth. If I heard a sound, I pressed a button. The sounds came so rapidly, I could hardly keep up. Then a pause, but I kept on pressing by accident. I explained my error when I was released from the enclosure. "Everybody does that," he said. "No problem."

His verdict was that I had 86 per cent hearing loss on the right side and, 14 per cent loss on the left side. That meant, combined, I was both 100 per cent deaf, and 100 per cent hearing. It was abysmally wonderful.

"It must be my chainsaw." I explained that my power saw revs so high, it scares people who aren't used to it.

"My left side is shielded from the racket," I finished.

"Could be," he said. Then he turned to his arsenal of hi-tech decryptors that printed a matrix with dots on a scatter graph. It showed an auditory slope beginning at "bat," and descending to "stone." My score was "borderline."

"You have several options," he told me. "You can carry on as is or, for $6,000, we can make you hear like you were brand new."

I gulped. "Is there nothing in between?"

Then came the pitch. He said I could try their latest hearing aids for a month and return them at no cost if I was not completely satisfied. All I had to do was sign that I would pay for them if they were lost or destroyed. The deal seemed reasonable, so I instantly agreed to do the month-long trial. What could go wrong?

"Know thyself," said the ancients at the oracle of Delphi. Forgetting that little chestnut of wisdom, I blithely went where the scatterbrained, abstract and random type of guy that I am, should never go.

Hearing aids require care. Happiness with hearing aids is easiest if you are quintessentially methodical, meticulously well organized and responsible. That should have been a red flag to me. Following a pattern is not my forte, and now I was going to have to develop a habit of keeping the bug-sized gadgets clean, and storing them carefully at night or if I went swimming, or removed them for any reason.

It did not take very long before the joy of hearing began to wear off. The first day I lost the tiny toolbox with replacement tips and cleaning stuff. I retraced my steps several times. Was this what life was going to become?

I eventually found the box and set up a no-fail system for tending and keeping the little gizmos clean and safe. After a couple of days of anxiety, I surrendered to the plan and dolefully adopted the hassle of my new life.

But things went really wrong on yard-waste day. Annalee and I were tired and dirty and needed a shower after raking and bagging leaves all afternoon. There were eight tall bags filled with leaves and clippings, all lined up in the carport. Leaning on my rake, something seemed wrong. I touched my ear. My listening bug was gone. So was the other one. I remembered the $6,000 penalty. I felt sick. Should I search the yard? Two tiny bugs in 5,000 square feet of lawn? What would my chances be? And who says I lost them? Maybe I had misplaced them before I began filling bags with leaves. I had no clue. The penalty was the same, whether I had lost them or misplaced them. This was an emergency with no exit.

My wife did a sweep of the house. No joy. I decided to check the leaf bags, one by one, on my hands and knees, inch by inch, bit by bit, rubbing the organic matter against the gritty surface of my garage.

The minutes became hours. The pawing through dust, branches, and leaves went on into the fifth bag when something that looked like the abdomen of a hornet caught my eye. It was filthy. Was it a pebble? It was one of the hearing aids.

Buoyed by the realization that I had just trapped a $3,000 bauble in the fingers of a $3 pair of garden gloves, I went on searching, with the illusion that another $3,000 hearing aid could not be far away.

"Dr. Livingston, I presume" was small potatoes when compared to the location of an artificial space-age nano-nerve in a pile of yard waste collected on a Saturday afternoon.

Later, amongst the filth of the same bag, the wee miracle of modern audiology appeared in all its ugly beauty.

The message for me was clear. I am unqualified to own hearing aids. I am a disorganized guy going deaf, and extremely fortunate to have the gift of borderline hearing. It took a while, but I cleaned up the earbuds with tweezers and laser blasts of compressed air. Then I returned them in their little box, thanked the corporation, and resolved to begin buying a lottery ticket with the weekly milk.


Hugh McKechnie lives in Newmarket, Ont.