A quiet place

One of my professors at Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University 40 years ago was Alain A. Levasseur, who, I’m pleased to notice, is still associated with the school as a Professor of Law Emeritus after a distinguished career.

It was largely because of Professor Levasseur that I developed an appreciation—even a preference—for Louisiana’s Napoleonic Code. Another thing I remember about Professor Levasseur was that he had the best hearing of any person I have ever known.

In a classroom of maybe 80 students, Levasseur could hear a whispered back row aside, even when he was in the middle of discussing some arcane point of civil procedure. Time and time again, he’d stop his lecture, focus his gaze on the offender and say evenly, “I heard that.” Sometimes he would repeat the offender’s comment.

It was like a magic trick, and demonstrative of the range of human capabilities. My wife Karen has wonderful hearing. A few people have absolute pitch. Allen Toussaint could hear the hum of a fluorescent light and tell you it was two cents short of a concert pitch B-flat.

I always thought I could hear OK. I didn’t have absolute pitch but could tune a guitar. As a kid I sang in junior high and high school musicals. I was in bands in the ’80s. I didn’t give my ears much thought until the mid-’90s.

It’d been years since I’d picked up a guitar. When I sang along with the radio, Karen would cringe and tell me I was off-key. I shrugged it off, figured it was a lack of practice. Singing is always mostly muscle memory anyway. I took a hearing test in the mid-’90s and passed. My hearing was fine.

It was only about a decade ago it became clear it was no longer fine. About three years ago I went back to the audiologist and confirmed this. I went back earlier this year and things hadn’t gotten any better.

In February, when I first put my hearing aids in, I immediately noticed a difference. Everything sounded more articulate. Crisper. I could once again hear sounds that I had forgotten, like the click my left knee sometimes makes. I didn’t have to turn the car radio up as loud on my drive home from the audiologist’s. I could enjoy the music that we streamed through the house in the evenings. I turned the volume on the television down a notch.

It was very pleasant, very much an improvement. But I would not have described the experience as revelatory.

That came at the end of the evening, when I slipped the devices out of my ears before going to bed, and was plunged into a quiet place. It seemed 80 to 90 percent of the world’s noise cut out. Karen’s voice was suddenly a muffled mumble. The loudest sound was blood pulsing in my temples.

It’s unnerving.

When I went back to the audiologist for a followup I told him about the experience. He nodded and said it wasn’t unusual; some patients stopped wearing their devices for fear they were somehow damaging their residual hearing.

This isn’t the case; he assured me. Our brains are very good at adjusting to and equalizing the stimuli they take in. My pre-hearing aid hearing was just as bad as what I experience upon taking the devices out at bedtime; I just don’t remember it that way. I remember my hearing being normal, because that’s what it was for me.

If I get up one morning and forget—or decide not to—put my hearing aids in, my brain would adjust within a couple of hours. The world would not seem dull or quiet; I wouldn’t feel I was missing much. I would turn up the radio volume in the car. I would probably think my hearing was OK.

I didn’t set out to purposefully test this hypothesis, but on two occasions recently I’ve gone out in the world without my hearing aids. On both occasions I didn’t realize I’d forgotten them until I got in my car and realized I had to turn the radio way up. My doctor was right; I didn’t feel especially impaired. I felt like I was hearing more or less normally.

I know I didn’t know what I’m missing, that my brain had acclimatized to a quieter world. I don’t wake up in the morning feeling like I’m not hearing everything I should. I have to consciously remember to put my hearing aids. And when I do, it doesn’t immediately feel like the world goes from black and white to technicolor; it just feels like I can hear better.

I really like my hearing aids. I have not had some of the problems I’ve heard others report. My brother-in-law doesn’t like to wear his when he eats breakfast because the sound of crunching cereal sounds industrial. I know what he means; there are some treble sounds, like the scrape of a dog’s toenails on a hardwood floor, that can sound abrupt and harsh and out of proportion—like they’ve been placed too high in the mix—but I don’t have any problems with close-up noise. I can eat tortilla chips without a problem.

And I don’t find my hearing aids uncomfortable. I’m usually unaware of them; more than once I’ve forgotten to take them out before stepping into a shower.

Some of this might be a function of both my audiologist’s skill and the fit and the quality of my particular devices—they come from Denmark and are relatively expensive (though there are some from the same manufacturer that cost twice as much).

I had tried some over-the-counter devices before breaking down and getting the hearing aids (Karen insisted on paying for them, which is both sweet and an acknowledgment that hard-of-hearing me was driving her nuts), and they seemed to work OK, for about a week. After that, for some reason, they were simply good in-ear headphones.

It is interesting that my hearing loss apparently was not due to any damage I did my ears in the ’80s, when there were many years when I spent more than 100 nights either going to concerts in large venues or listening to live music in clubs. I don’t, like a lot of my cohort, have any signs of tinnitus, just genetic high-frequency hearing loss. I didn’t do anything to cause it; I couldn’t do anything to prevent it.

They are limited-purpose miracles. My hearing is better, but I still miss some things, especially in environments where there is a lot of background noise. They do not give me the super hearing my civil procedure professor had.

But I’m reminded how dramatically the difference is every evening, when I take out my devices and slide intio a quiet place.