HEARING LOSS

I was due at the hospital one morning this week for a hearing test, when someone rang saying that the consultant was unavailable so could I come in the afternoon instead as a vacancy had unexpectedly occurred.  As hearing loss is pretty much irredeemable I hoped I wasn't filling 'dead mens shoes.'  Still, as it had been five months,  I went and handed in my letter to an unwelcoming receptionist  who said to wait in the waiting area.  I had brought a book.

Not knowing whether I was deaf or not I thought she might have spoken with ex-agg-er-at-ed em-ph-as-is.  I suppose I should have responded 'pardon?' but couldn't quite bring myself to the required level of facetiousness.  The receptionist did not look like the sort of woman who might welcome a joke.  Besides, no doubt that is what people do say to her multiple times everyday.  Perhaps that's why she looked jaded.

I had barely time to read a page of my book when someone on the far side of the room mumbled my name.  I waved, but he seemed to be short-sighted so I had to take a chance that I had heard correctly. That's my hearing problem in a nutshell: I can hear sound well enough, it's deciphering it into words that's the problem. I can hear that someone has pronounced two syllables - but which two syllables?

That's what I explained to a young and attractive lady audiologist into whose tiny green soundproof cubicle I was admitted after a further spell of waiting in a corridor. She had me explaining the whys and wherefores of my condition (such that it is) and peered into my ears, perhaps to check that they weren't full of earwigs or dead mice. They weren't.  Then she slapped some headphones on me and told me to press a button when I heard a noise. 

The noises - or rather tones - came first in one ear and then in the other. Most were very faint. Anyhow I thought I had most of them.  She wrote the results down on a chart and the result looked like our economic performance in recent years.  It seemed to be downhill all the way from the lower frequencies, although curiously enough the very high frequencies I could hear better than the ones just below them.

She told me I needed a hearing aid.  Pardon? I said.  For the fact is that I don't really want a hearing aid at all, fussing with something stuck in or behind my ear.  (In actual fact the aid that she said she would recommend contrived to be both these things, being fixed somehow behind the ear but having an eel like tube that plugged into the ear itself.)  I have to acknowledge though it would be a useful device for watching television where I find that the actors mumble so much that subtitles are an asset.  Ditto when people call me on the telephone and I cannot tell the difference between an S or an F in a postcode - or, surprisingly because they don't sound the same,  between 2 and 3.  I work on the basis of choosing whatever alternative I think it isn't and then I find I am usually correct.

I would find a device very useful in such situations I said, but she said sternly that that part-time use wasn't permitted.  I would have to wear the thing all the time.  The brain needed to learn to hear again, she said.   I didn't argue.  We'll see how things work out.  I might just forget. She gave me an envelope full of matronly advice about hearing aids and said the device would be ready for fitting in a few weeks. They would write to me again.  'Thank you,'  I said and prepared to leave - 'but you have to see the doctor', she said.  'Why?' I asked, 'what will he do?'

So I waited again and then was ushered in to see a beaming faced consultant to whom I had to go through all my previous explanations again while he tried to find something wrong with me: general health? blood pressure? heart?  I felt like saying 'seek and ye shall find:' for few bits of me seem to be working as they should, though compared with most of the inmates one finds wandering in and out of the hospital corridors I have a lot to be thankful for.  Then he looked at my hearing test results and decided that because there was a disparity between left and right ears when it came to the higher end of the spectrum this might be due to a benign growth on the auditory nerve and that this required an MRI scan.  I said I didn't suffer from claustrophobia.

To reassure me he said they only find something in 1 in 100 scans and when they do find something they just keep an eye on it if it is only small.   But why?  It's no wonder the NHS has no money. It isn't even that I am properly deaf. If they want to scan something I am sure my arteries or liver or appendix would give them far more interesting results than my auditory nerve.  We'll send you an appointment he said.  Afterwards I'll review the results and write to you.  'Can't you just send me an email?' I queried. 'We're not geared up to that yet.'  Again, no wonder the poor old NHS has no money: all those letters.

It so happens for the 48 hours since coming home from the hospital I have been ill and off my food, feeling totally zonked and unable to work.  I am (I hope) better now, and of course the illness may just be a coincidence but it underlines my belief that hospitals are places you go to get sick and are best avoided.

*****

Now, for you delectation and delight here are a few pictures from our summer garden show 'Wind in the Willows, which I directed last Saturday.

Here are most of the cast before the show. Toad and Rat at Extreme Left

Toad, Rat and Mole and Audience

Toad in Washerwoman's Dress and Engine Driver

THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW

The lovely Pondside has tagged me for a 'Kreative' Bogger and invited me to write ten things about myself that readers may not know.

1. Spain:  As a baby I lived in Gibraltar and had a Spanish nurse.  Like Logan Gonzales Mountstuart - the protagonist of 'Any Human Heart' - the first words I heard were therefore Spanish.  Ever since then I have collided on and off with the country and its language.  My signature dish is 'Gambas a l'Aillo' or prawns in a spicy garlic oil which I first tasted in Barcelona.  I was also privileged to tour the Sagrada Familia cathedral in that city with its (current) architect, high up among the pinnacles where workmen were installing coloured glass.  Then at another time I found myself run off the road and almost killed by the King of Spain - or rather his minders.  We'd taken a wrong route to the airport.  Not difficult in Spain.

2. Cuba:  A wonderful place with wonderful people and the only place I have ever been followed by my own spy detail.  He wasn't very good and to embarrass him we took him to lunch.  Whether because of this of no, I subsequently found myself sent the Cuban Vice-Minister for Agriculture and spent a happy day, taking him to lunch and touring dried flower establishments and growers in South Wales. In an unguarded moment I must have persuaded the Cubans of the commercial possibilities of dried flowers.

3. Europe: Growing up in the aftermath of war and as chance would have it in the company of young people from every continent I became a committed supporter of an all embracing Europe.  Nothing very exciting happened though I did write new English lyrics to the European Anthem and was on television once at the European Parliament arguing for an elected European President. 

4.  Flying:  My father was in the RAF and I grew up yearning to fly. At school I won a flying scholarship and learned to fly a plane before I learned to drive a car, going solo in under six hours at the age of 17. Sadly, I subsequently found that I didn't really care for flying after all.  I was in a plane once that was struck by lightening.  It sounded as if Thor had cracked us with his hammer and all the lights went out for a few seconds.

5. Work: I have had a multiplicity of jobs, not all of them paid: agricultural labourer, Gestetner operator, storekeeper, occupational psychologist, senior civil servant, politician, insurance salesman, European business consultant, eurocrat, journalist, recruitment consultant, editor, small business owner,  actor and UNESCO vice-chair (in Wales).  Of the 15 organisations behind these occupations, 8 went out of business either with me still on board or shortly afterwards.  I have worked for myself for the past 28 years.  Now in my mid-sixties I am embarking on the new career of novelist.

6. Sport: I have no skill with edged tools, says my horoscope with uncanny accuracy.  Nor do I have any skill in sports that involve moving balls.  The only sporting distinction that I ever achieved was to become Oxfordshire U16 full bore shooting champion.  That wasn't even a 'sitting-down' sport; it was all about lying down and keeping still.

7. Education: At college in Cambridge I was full of angst.  I had over my desk a sign which said 'I am the biggest failure of the twentieth century.'  Still I became President of the May Ball Committee and just scraped an acceptable degree. 

8. I do love challenging conventional wisdom but I have to report that mostly conventional wisdom is right.

9.  I am physically male but mentally female which is sometimes a great handicap and sometimes a great delight.  I am reputedly descended from the 'most handsome man in the Highlands' - but then, aren't we all?  If we go back far enough we are all descended from someone.

10.  I love nasturtiums and I wear red a lot.

That's enough things you didn't know!