Hearing loss is pernicious and without my aid I’m on the edge

ONCE a high-flying magazine editor in Dublin, living the classic, harried executive lifestyle, Kate Kerrigan swapped it all to be a fulltime novelist and live in her idyll — the fishing village of Killala, Co. Mayo. But rather than being a sleepy existence, it’s been anything but for the 50-something mother of The Teenager (15), and The Tominator, seven (oh, and there’s the artist husband Niall, too). It’s chaos, as she explains every week in her hilarious and touching column...

ILOSE things. Not normal menopausal losing things which is ‘I lose things a bit more than I usually do.’, or even‘ I am for getting things rather a lot these days.’ I mean ADHD losing things, which is endemic, everyday, pathological.Things that are a disastrous coincidence for most people — like say, losing a credit card and car keys in one day — are everyday occurrences for me. Ask my husband because he’s the one picking up the pieces. Ask the girls in Ballina Specsavers too, because the two-for-one offer is moot when you lose both of them — daily.

I now get free frames, bog-standard lenses and lose my glasses one pair at a time. I tie them around my neck, keep a pair of them in every bag and every flat surface in the house and car and still I cannot keep them.

Over the years I have lost countless things my husband has bought me from Mont Blanc pens to jewellery. The only important item I have managed to keep myself from losing has been my hearing aid which I acquired in September 2016 and have managed to keep safe in its little Specsavers box, until three weeks ago.

I LOVE my hearing aid. I never expected to but from the first moment I put it on I felt as if I was re-entering a world that over the years I had become estranged from without knowing it. Reduced hearing comes so slowly that you don’t notice it happening. Your loved ones get annoyed that you can’t hear them and you accuse them of mumbling.

It’s comfortable to stay in cosy denial from ones dissent into decrepitude. But hearing loss is pernicious. It cuts you off. That afternoon in September when my husband pushed me into Specsavers for my free hearing test turned into a life changing one, not least because I wasn’t expecting it. Being able to fully hear everything that is going on around me means way more to me than having to squint at menus when I forget my reading glasses.

I was coming back from England, ironically, with my ADHD diagnosis when I got i nto a muddle going through wretched security. In a hurry, I put my hearing aid into a plastic sandwich bag instead of its tidy little box. When I went to put it back in, the plastic bag was open.

I found a large gap in the bottom of my holdall next to one of the wheels. The little silver and blue bullet-shaped gizmo was somewhere on the ground in Luton airport. Not a hope of retrieving it.

I just could not face telling my husband. Admitting it to myself was hard enough. It didn’t take him long to cop on. The recent ADHD diagnosis made him more sympathetic than he had a right to be.

A hearing aid is an expensive piece of kit. A couple of thousand anyway. Worth it, but not something you want to shell out for every 18 months. We don’t have a grand for me to spend on one ear right now.

SOI just decided to make do. For the past three weeks I’ve been functioning on one ear. I have survived. The cost has been the quality of life. Birdsong. Background music. I can hear myself speak and in one-to-one conversation I’m fine. I don’t care about being a deaf old bat who shouts at people and says ‘what?’ all the time — although I know other people don’t like it very much. However, I hate the feeling I’m on the edge of life. I’m a writer. I need to know what’s going on around me. I want all of it!

Passing Specsavers yesterday, I snapped. Nicola, Patrick and Hanna, my glasses-drama front of house, they gathered around, making comforting noises while I pitched for sympathy— probably very loudly. ‘Is it insured?’ Nicola asked. I looked back at her blankly. No idea.

Andy, the audiologist, came out and joined the conversation: ‘ we always advise…’ ‘YES!’ I shouted. Three weeks on ADHD meds and I remembered, clearly, filling out a form and sending it off to the insurance company. I have no idea what insurance company but then that’s what husbands are for. ‘It’s insured!’

Andy’s diary was full but sensing my plight he kindly fitted me in. Leaving, I heard someone else’s car radio and thought, I’m back!