When the world goes quiet
The use of personal devices has doctors worried it won’t be only the elderly sporting hearing aids in future
Samantha Baines was 30 when she noticed a peculiar whooshing noise in her ear. An actress and stand-up comedian, Baines first heard the sound at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2016 as she sat next to a speaker at a particularly loud concert.
“I heard this weird noise in my ear,” remembers Baines, who has starred in Netflix’s The
Crown and ITV’s Call the Midwife.
“It’s like if you fanned something quickly next to your ear, and you can hear the wind moving. I ignored it at first, but kept hearing it in loud environments, any time I was in a noisy restaurant or a club, or it got too loud on the Tube.”
At the advice of a GP, she went to an audiologist, who diagnosed her with hearing loss and tinnitus, a condition that makes people hear unexplained sounds in their ear. She was told she would need to wear a hearing aid.
“I thought [hearing aids] were just for people who spoke Latin and ate Werther’s Originals. In the waiting room at the hearing centre, everybody had grey hair, and in the medical leaflets I was given, everybody was in their 70s and 80s. I didn’t know anybody else who had a hearing aid. I felt completely alone and different, and that it had changed my life for the worse.”
But Baines’s predicament was not as rare as she thought. Around one in six Britons suffers from some degree of hearing loss, and 28 per cent are diagnosed between the ages of 16 and 60, according to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People. Doctors fear that it is on the rise among under-70s thanks to the proliferation of high-intensity headphone sets, known as “personal audio”.
“Personal audio is going to have huge impacts, definitely,” says audiologist Adam Chell, who diagnosed Baines’ condition.
“There’s a general 60-60 rule: You listen to your personal audio for no more than 60 minutes a day, at no more than 60 per cent of the maximum volume.
“Every generation has its issues with noise. If you look at the industrial generation, they were working in coal mines and paper mills, and you see lots of ‘gunner’s ear’.
“Then you’ve got the baby boomers who were partying at rock concerts and everything. And now you’ve got this generation, for whom it will probably be personal audio, and having a device in their hands at all times. But we won’t see the effects for a little while.”
Baines is convinced her condition stems from a Limp Bizkit concert in her teens, when she was sitting directly next to the speaker.
After her diagnosis, she wished she had gone for a hearing test sooner; on average, it takes between seven and 12 years for somebody to go for a test after first noticing a problem. “There were things I blamed on people mumbling, or the television being too quiet, or someone having an accent in a loud environment.”
She also worried that her career was in jeopardy.
“I thought I was going to have to stop period dramas and stand-up comedy. I thought, ‘I can’t wear my hearing aid in a period drama, because they haven’t been invented’.”
Baines was fitted with two hearing aids — an in-ear aid, which is small and usually cannot be seen, and an overear aid, which is larger and connects to an app on her smartphone, allowing her to stream podcasts and listen back to episodes of BBC Radio London, which she occasionally presents.
Despite her worries, she found her employers to be surprisingly accommodating. She is currently starring in a West End show, and wears her over-ear aid on stage, which can be seen by the audience only if she lifts her hair.
“I think if we just open up and tell people, they will put things in place, but it can be really scary because you feel like you might lose your job.”
Her hearing aid also gives her the ability to hear the whispers of hecklers at her stand-up comedy gigs — although that “isn’t always a good thing”.
Along with hearing loss, Baines’ diagnosis of tinnitus came as a surprise. She hadn’t known much about the condition, and vaguely thought that it gave you a “ringing” sensation in your ears — hers was more a “whooshing” sound, so it couldn’t possibly be tinnitus, she thought.
Tinnitus can make you hear a whole range of unexplained noises, according to Chell, including buzzing, hissing, and throbbing. For some patients with dementia, tinnitus can even come in the form of music seeming to play on repeat. It affects as many as one in 10 people, but only 10 per cent of those affected will find it “life-affecting”. In some extreme cases it has even been known to drive patients to the brink of suicide.
Baines’ whooshing noise was triggered by loud noise; her hearing aid, which limits the volume of sound entering her ear, has mostly made it go away.
Despite her initial dismay, Baines’ condition is not nearly as life-restricting as she expected, and she hopes to paint an optimistic picture in her new children’s book, Harriet Versus the Galaxy, which tells the story of a 10-year-old deaf girl who realises that her hearing aid can translate alien languages.