Skip to main content

Grasping Straws

This past birthday I received a Sennheiser Monoural UC Headset as a gift. There is a specific point to this particular choice. I refuse to use a hearing aid though I have very limited hearing from my left ear. To me that is a sign of succumbing to and accepting that my deafness is winning. The last time I saw a hearing doctor and she walked me through the graphs, I felt some despair but it did not diminish my desire to to be defiant. The good doctor was unable to persuade me to consider one of many concealed hearing aid option - so small that no one would notice. I would know and that was not going to work. A knows this about me and hence the gift. It is meant to give me the option to hear through my bad ear all day as I go from one call to the next. 

This way I would be providing aural stimulation to the ear that will likely die on a vine otherwise. Doctors have related this cognitive decline over time - and every time my hearing was measured, I was warned about this by the doctor. I love my gift because it gives me a chance to stay in this fight in my own way and not feel I had to throw in the towel - not quite as yet at least. I know many elderly people who are similarly defiant about getting help for their bad hearing. My father is one of them - and as much I as dislike that he makes it difficult for us to have a conversation by phone, I respect his desire not to be reminded constantly of his failing faculties and requiring to depend on things and people to get through the day. That could feel like a failure to a man who took pride is being there for family at all times, taking charge and being able to provide. It is not just about the loss of hearing - it is about loss of agency overall. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...