ear surgery

My New Toy

Fandango25 Comments

Before I tell you about my new toy, I first have to set the stage. About two and a half years ago I had to have surgery on my left ear to remove a non-cancerous growth in my middle ear. The growth was successfully removed. However, by the time the damn think was excised, it had consumed the tiny little bones inside my middle ear that connect my eardrum to my inner ear, therein rendering me profoundly deaf in that ear.

My inability to hear out of my left ear created a problem for my wife. First of all, she had to speak very loudly when she was talking to me so that I could hear her and not be constantly saying “what?” But also, whenever we would watch TV together, which is almost every night, I had to turn the volume way up in order to hear the dialogue. Plus, I’d turn closed captions on. Neither the high volume nor the closed captions pleased my wife.

So I bought noise canceling Bluetooth headphones that I could don when watching TV, and they worked great for me. But any time my wife wanted to say something to me, she had to wave or shout at me to get my attention, since I couldn’t hear her when wearing my headphones.

Earlier this year, the hearing in my right ear started to deteriorate a bit, and my ear doctor suggested that it was time to consider hearing aids. Three months ago, I did, in fact, get hearing aids, as I described in this post, and they helped with my hearing in general. But when watching TV, it was still a bit challenging to make out dialogue. So I would turn down the volume on my hearing aids inside my ears and place my headphones over my ears.

A few weeks ago, when I had a follow up appointment with my audiologist to check my hearing aids, I mentioned that I was wearing headphones over my hearing aids while watching TV. That’s when he told me about a TV adapter device specifically made for my hearing aids.

My new toy

The device connects to my TV’s audio output and wirelessly sends the audio signals to my hearing aids, and it works great. The dialogue is crystal clear, as it’s being pumped directly into my ears. I can adjust the volume for each ear from an app on my iPhone and I can even hear some sounds from my left ear.

And best of all, my wife doesn’t have to wave or shout at me if she wants to get my attention. Win-win!

TMP — What Did You Say?

Fandango33 Comments

Every Monday, Paula Light, with her The Monday Peeve prompt, gives us an opportunity to vent or rant about something that pisses us off. My peeve today is about my hearing.

Actually, there is some good news mixed in with the bad news. The good news is that more than two years after losing my sense of taste as an unintended consequence of ear surgery, it seems to be starting to return. I am actually beginning to taste food again. Hooray!!

The bad news, and what my peeve is about, is my hearing. I lost the hearing in my left ear when a growth was removed from my middle ear at that surgery that caused me to lose my sense of taste. The growth in my middle ear had eaten the tiny bones that connect the ear drum to the inner ear, which is the mechanism that converts sound waves into actual sounds. So I’ve been deaf in my left ear for more than two years.

I bought a set of noise cancelling, Bluetooth headphones to use while my wife and I are watching TV together because, in order for me to hear the sound, the TV speaker volume was too loud for her. These headphones enabled me to hear the TV without blowing my wife out of the room and worked great over the past two years. But a few weeks ago, the sound coming from the right earpiece began to sound muffled to the point where the dialogue was so muddy-sounding that I couldn’t make out what was being said.

I thought the issue was with my headphones, so I contacted the manufacturer and they promptly sent me replacement headphones. And that was when my worst fear was realized. It wasn’t the headphones, it was my hearing. Fuck! It seems I’m losing the hearing in my right ear. Both spoken word and music sound muffled with or without headphones.

I decided to try other brands of headphones. I ordered a pair from Amazon, but had to return them because they were on-ear, and not over-the ear, and didn’t have noise cancelling capability, so when I watched TV, it felt like I was in an echo chamber, hearing the sound coming through my headphones, but a millisecond later, hearing the sound — at a lower volume — coming from the TV speakers. Ugh.

Then I decided to spend more money and I bought a pair of relatively expensive Beats headphones. Here’s my comment that I posted on Amazon:

These headphones are beautiful, comfortable, well-built, and I really wanted to love them. They paired perfectly with my iPhone, but when I tried to pair them with my Samsung 65” HDTV, the Samsung TV couldn’t find them. I tried multiple times and the Beats headphones didn’t show up on the list of Bluetooth devices on the TV. I spent an entire afternoon on the phone with Beats (Apple) support and with Samsung support, but neither support team was able to figure out how to pair the headphones to the TV. So, regrettably, I’m returning them.

I figured the third time might be a charm, so I ordered another brand of headphones, the Soundcore Q30 Hybrid Active Noise Cancelling headphones. Good news is that they easily paired with my TV. Better news is that it comes with an an iPhone app that has an equalizer functionality built in. This allows me to lower the base sounds and raise the treble sounds, making it so I can actually hear clear, crisp dialogue that is un-muffled out of my right ear. Yay!

But the trouble is that when I take off the headphones, I still can’t hear at all from my left ear and the hearing from my right ear is muddy, to the point that I’m constantly saying “What did you say?” or “Say again” to my wife. And she’s getting very annoyed about that. I may have to admit that it’s time to get some hearing aids.

Anyway, this is my Monday peeve. Sorry this post is so long.

SoCS — Yum!

Fandango24 Comments

For this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill has given us the word “yum” and asked us to use it any way we’d like.

The first thing I thought about was “Yummy Yummy Yummy,” a dreadful bit of bubblegum music from 1968 recorded by a group called Ohio Express.

I’m sorry that you had to listen to that. With that unpleasantness out of the way, let’s move on.

The formal definition of the word “yum” is that it’s an utterance “used to express pleasure at eating, or at the prospect of eating, a particular food.” And that made me think about Ben & Jerry’s Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream ice cream, my favorite flavor of ice cream.

Unfortunately, the sad truth is that, since I had ear surgery to remove a growth in my middle ear back at the end of 2019, I have lost my sense of taste. So these days, with literally no sense of taste, I’m not deriving much pleasure from eating food. Because without a sense of taste, everything I eat — and eat I must in order to stay alive — is fairly tasteless. Hence, I don’t often say — or feel — “yum” anymore.

I Have No Taste

Fandango32 Comments

D2EC141D-D8E0-446A-94AD-B3A725D66938One of the strange, unexpected, and most disconcerting consequences of the ear surgery I had about six weeks ago is that I seem to have lost my sense of taste in the food that I eat. Everything I put in my mouth tastes either bland, metallic, or bitter. Even my favorite foods seem to have little to no discernable taste anymore.

Enjoying delicious-tasting food is one of life’s little pleasures and it’s killing me that I don’t get much pleasure out of eating these days. I actually did a Google search using the phrase “lost sense of taste after ear surgery.” One of the articles I came across said:

“Taste change can occur after ear surgery due to a nerve of taste that runs under the eardrum and brings taste to the side of the tongue. Loss of taste on the side of the tongue can occur in up to 10% of ear procedures and may last for a few months.”

Great. I’m one of the lucky 10%. But maybe there is yet some hope that my good taste will return — probably right around the time that I have to go in for round two of ear surgery.

Living in a fishbowl

A9F1206C-B9B5-4D53-8232-C6EC3C07170BOur new home that has lots and lots of windows, which is a good thing because it’s open, airy, and bright. But it has no window treatments. No shades, no blinds, no curtains, no shutters, no drapes. Which is fine if you’re exhibitionists. But my wife and I are not.

So one of the first things we did after moving in last week was to meet with a local purveyor of windows treatments and order a bunch. But because they will be custom made for our various windows and sliding glass doors, it will take about four to five weeks for them to be delivered and installed.

Not wanting to be living in a fishbowl for the next month, I spent hours over the weekend putting up opaque window film on all of the street-facing windows in the house just so we can walk around inside our own home without our every move, particularly at night, being visible to any of our new neighbors walking by our house. After all, you only have one chance to make a first impression, right?