"I'm sorry, what did you say?

Today, up at 0 Dark-thirty. That’s military jargon for any ungodly hour when the last thing you want is to pull your body out of bed and start any kind of purposeful activity. Some concepts simply can’t be expressed any more succinctly or accurately than when they are conveyed as an acronym or jargon.

I’m up at this hour because I have an 0800 appointment at the VA hospital in Johnson City. The audiology department, the nice folks who catalog and try to help me deal with my hearing loss are running some research programs. Today, my hearing deficit profile, how it graphs out as hearing ability vs. Hertz, fits the pattern they are interested in studying. Hopefully the time I spend listening for sounds that I won’t be able to hear &/or for words that I won’t be able to pick out from background clutter will allow them to help another vet with less profound hearing loss.

I know when the damage really started.

When I reported to my unit in Quon Loi they assigned me a bunk space and handed me an M-16 to care for.

My BCT rifle training had been done using the M-14. My M-16 training consisted of boarding an un-air-conditioned bus in August for a trip to a training area in the Texas desert. We incipient medics were allowed to fire the qualification ritual for rifles but not allowed time to battle sight the weapons we were to use for that 90 minutes of qual time. We were also handed the opportunity to fire on magazine in automatic fire mode – “rock & Roll. Note that at no time did we wear hearing protection while training with rifles. When I was offered a chance, the next morning, to battle sight the weapon that might be needed I reported to the NCO in charge of the detail. We walked out to the perimeter, yelled to the tower guards that we would be shooting in the general direction of some much perforated, rusted out 55 gallon drums, and before any orders were given to organize the detail, someone began firing from behind and slightly to the side of the line formed by the rest of us. The repeated rapid shots left several of us holding our ears, unable to hear speech, wondering if the ringing in our ears would ever go away.

I’d been told that standing to the front of an M-16 discharge could perforate ear drums. I don’t think any of us received that amount of damage but I believe that it can happen.

During the rest of my time saving democracy from Asia, I was often too close to rifle and shotgun fire, as well as mortar, rocket, artillery shell, grenade, mine, and bomb detonations. I spent a lot of time waiting for the ringing in my ears to stop. Some of the time it did.

When I was discharged from active duty I did something that was not difficult but incredibly fortuitous. I had noticed that I could no longer tune my guitar by ear nearly as well as when I entered service. I complained about it during the exit physical and someone in the fairy godmother department actually ordered a full-scale hearing test that remained in my military health records.

Having been exposed to the hearing-unfriendly noises of combat, I then wound up in the equally, perhaps even more hearing-unfriendly clinical lab of the 1970’s -2001. I spent 8-16; even 24 hours/day working surrounded by the nearly constant sounds vacuum pumps and high speed centrifuges, many of which emitted over 120 Decibel of noise. At some point in my career, the ringing noise became a constant annoyance. The damage became even more apparent when I discovered that I could not hear the alarm indicators on many lab instruments. It was the subject of jokes in several labs I managed. But it was annoying for my work colleagues and frustrating for me.

By the time I met Gloria I needed an electronic tuner to tune my guitar. I could no longer hear the subtle differences that good tuning requires.

I honestly saw no chance of improvement. I continued to work in a hearing destroying profession. No one in my profession has ever really looked at using hearing protection. We protect our eyes and our skin, our mucosa. But not our hearing. The doctors who treated me simply said the loss was profound and not something they could fix. Hearing aids are incredibly expensive and I never had health insurance that covered them.

Over the years Gloria has put up with my decreasing ability to hear her as she speaks. We need the television at different levels. Surprisingly, she wants it louder than I do. Background noise, clutter, makes it extremely hard for me to hear conversation in restaurants, in theaters; and to dialogue on TV. Hence the volume differences for she and I. Keeping it lower lessens the clutter and gives me chance to harvest the dialogue from the signal noise. That clutter doesn’t affect her nearly as much. She knows I’m not kidding when I say, “I’m sorry, what did you say?” She understands when I turn to her during a conversation and look for her input, when I won’t answer her because I’m in a different room and want to be sure what I’m responding to. And, very importantly, she understands how exhausting it is to be in a room full of talking people and other noise generating things, to spend so much energy and concentration upon hearing the central and important thing taking place at that moment. Hearing the calls for a dance before the music begins is a prime example.

When I was admitted as a VA patient I mentioned my hearing loss. That long ago exit physical popped up in a file and the VA feels that at least part of my tinnitus and my hearing loss, profound in both ears, is service connected. Remember all those noisy tools and toys in Asia? So do I. VA provides me with hearing aids. Not just cheap basic analog models but custom-fitted, custom tuned, digital models. When I wear them I hear sounds I can’t even recall ever hearing. Putting them in for the first time was similar to putting on my first pair of glasses and becoming able to see leaves on trees and stars in the sky.

When I wear them the lack of ability to screen out the clutter and the constant ringing that lets me know I’m awake, doesn’t change. The important points are amplified, but the clutter is higher too. I pick and choose when to wear them. I can’t get them wet. So I often don’t put them until I’ve showered. I can’t wear them when I split wood, use a chainsaw, a string trimmer, the push mower, and especially when I practice shooting. It’s still as difficult to hear the call for a dance. People aren’t going to change their conversation patterns. But once the dance starts I’ve a greater ability to hear the music and key on it. Last Saturday I turned them on for the dance, turned them down after each dance. Each aid can be turned up or down, off or on separately. That’s a feature my first set lacked. Better living through electronics!

Gloria knows that if I don’t answer her it is really because I don’t hear her. She realizes that without electronics I simply don’t hear the bird and insect sounds she enjoys so much.

Me, I’m grateful for her patience, her empathy and her help. I’m grateful to VA for know how much we Veterans need to be helped to hear. And there are times I’m very glad for the volume control and the on/off switch. It’s easier to ignore bad television and bad music if you can’t hear it.



Breakfast today was steel cut oatmeal seasoned with cinnamon, ginger, clove, nutmeg, and cardamom. It was put on to cook last night in a slow cooker at low temp. By the time I got up this morning it had become a very tasty hot cereal with wonderful texture. We eat this every Wednesday morning for breakfast. Gloria has a stained glass class and it keeps her going during the morning. I eat it with honey, with maple syrup, or with a bit of jam rather than using sugar in it. Since I have no taste at all for milk, I add a bit of butter to the cooker and another bit when I eat the oatmeal. Sometimes I add raisins, dried, chopped dried figs.

Tomorrow, I think I will have fresh figs, slice open and placed atop toast. I’ll add some sheep milk cheese, drizzle some honey over the cheese, and broil it just long enough to melt and caramelize the cheese.

The drive into town was pleasant this morning, once I was awake enough to function. The sunrise was beautiful, driving east on Highway 107. The clouds were coral, sky fading to blue, and the northern end of the Great Smokies stayed in dark green shadow, marking the border where Tennessee becomes North Carolina. There was no parking lot dance for me today. Arriving at 0730 usually means there will be a space somewhere.

The research project may someday help patients who are having trouble distinguishing speech. They were looking for the smallest gap between two sounds that I could distinguish at various tone levels, frequencies, and with varying background levels. I spent two hours pushing one of three buttons to correspond to which tone sequence had a gap. They had temporal lobe monitor leads in place. The second two hours consisted of watching a movie with English subtitles while the researchers piped tone patterns into one ear. They wanted to know if my brain could distinguish gaps while otherwise distracted with the movie and background noise. I guess I passed the criteria as they asked if I would be interested in taking part in further studies.

After we spent some time in the pool took the trash out, reset the mouse traps for Gloria’s car, we went back out to cover the pool after adding water. Gloria asked what I was writing about today. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” She’s so used to hearing those words that it took three repetitions of the query and answer before she realized I was not joking.


New followers, thanks for reading along. Hope you find this interesting enough to stay.

Gloria, me, and Tova Photograph taken by our friend, David Gans.