Say what?
Both me and my brother have a genetical hearing disability, inherited from our dad, and I’ve also added on to that with loud concerts and explosions… and I’ve got tinnitus. Basically my hearing is pretty bad!
I can get through my day-to-day life pretty good, but every now and then I really notice it; in bars or similar crowded places with a constant background noise I have a hard time to hear people and correspondingly I also have issues when it’s just me and someone else having a relaxed conversation in front of the TV or similar… In many ways the second issue is harder to get along with, I mean, who cares about people in bars?!
When I was 9 I got glasses, and I started dreaming of the day I could wear contact lenses, the problem was that I had pretty strong astigmatism and contacts that correct that problem are made in steps and my correction was just in between steps and I couldn’t wear the contacts at work since it gave me headache to stare at a computer screen. So a few years ago I had laser eye surgery and now I can see through walls.
Well, hearing surgery isn’t that advanced yet, and I guess we have to wait another few years before you can get Johnny Mnenomic-like computer chips built straight into your brain… So I have pretty much two options:
- keep saying ‘what’, ‘huh’, ‘come again’ and other similar lame comments all the time
- get hearing aids
Well, guess what? I don’t want to have hearing aids! I finally managed to lose the glasses and now I have to strap on a pair of those? Hell no.
And then I started working at Kasai; my boss has pretty bad hearing and wears hearing aids… I guess I’m just getting used to them more, and I’m starting to get more and more tired of asking people to repeat things a hundred times over and over again…
So I guess I’ll have to look into the whole issue a bit more, look at options and ‘semi-invisible’ products (yeah right). There’s quite a few places that deal with this in Cebu so I guess a visit might be coming up.
Or I might just stick this whole thing in the pan and get on with it.