Meet Bluebonnet_909!

When I was a third year medical student, I had a six week long family medicine rotation. Every morning the students would visit their patients and then meet for morning report at eight o’clock. There were always muffins, bagels, donuts, and juice on the long table around which we met together. Students sat at the far end of the table; residents sat around the middle, and staff attendings sat near the door. On most rotations, the resident on call the night before made a list of all the patients on the service. This rotation was more relaxed. Staff would joke with the residents and they were always kind and professional with the medical students. As we all arrived, we’d check in with the resident and student who took call the night before. Had there been many admissions or was there time to watch videos together in the call room?

There was a resident visiting from another service who was pregnant. I was pregnant, too, but now showing yet. The second year resident on the service was a fantastic person. Often his wife would bring their daughter, who was about nine months old then, up to the hospital to eat supper. I wanted to be just like them.

Anyway, the meeting would start and we’d discuss new patients first. The students weren't usually involved in that and I usually couldn't hear the discussion. I thought is was because it was a long table and they weren’t really talking to us. When we all rounded together after morning report, the students would divvy up the new patients. I’d learn all about them by talking to the admitting residents and poring over their charts after rounds.

Next in morning report came old patients. The senior resident on service would pick who to start with, or the staff would ask him about someone. Then they’d look down to our end of the table and say “How’s she feeling this morning?” Often I would the feeling I was approaching a traffic light and I couldn’t quite see what color it was. Were they talking to me? “Who are we on?” I would ask my friends. I had two good ones on this rotation. When we went through the patients in numerical order by hospital room it was easier to follow, but sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes I looked like I was daydreaming.

Around that same time, my husband would get into the car with me and immediately turn the radio, which I had been listening to in the car alone before, way down. He was listening to the television very quietly and then asking from the next room for me to turn it down. People always mumbled. Finally, I got the idea that it was about me and went for a hearing test.

My audiogram showed, I think, about a 15 dB loss. This is about the point where people begin to notice a difference, my audiologist told me. The loss was the most in the mid-range of frequencies, where conversation lives. I wasn’t really surprised because early hearing loss runs in one side of my family. My mother’s loss had started when she was pregnant with me. She had always told me that her loss was progressive and that she expected one day to be completely deaf. At this point I was grief-stricken. They way I saw it, progressive hearing loss to total deafness could limit my years in medical practice. I imagined a life without music. I was irrationally angry at my mother. For a few weeks I had tearful episodes daily, full of that kind of catastrophic thinking. Between episodes, nameless loss permeated my mood. Knowing that this was not a “serious” health problem kept me from confiding my feelings to anyone but my husband and my parents.

My mother told me about the Texas Rehabilitation Commission, which kindly bought me my hearing aids and stethescope amplifier. My audiologist sent me to an otolaryngologist, who told me that this type of adult onset sensorineural loss is usually autosomal dominant and not sex linked, meaning it pretty much goes parent to child regardless of the sex of parent and child. By this time I was becoming visibly pregnant. I was sorry that I probably passed the gene one, and I as glad that I got pregnant before I knew, so I didn’t agonize over whether or not to have children.

I stopped being angry at my mother and I encouraged her to stop feeling bad. She introduced me to her audiologist who she’d been seeing for 30 years, and he made the ear molds for my aides. He referred me to a subspecialist, a neurotologist, who knew more. He told me that I would probably only lose about half of my hearing, and that my mother’s loss would plateau there too.

It has been about four years and so far he has been right. I no longer see my career in medicine as limited because of my hearing loss. I am merely inconvenienced. I'm not missing out on the rest of my life either. My husband has helped in every possible way. Specifically he makes sure that we are in the same room and looking at each other before starting a conversation. He leaves the closed captioning on the TV and figures out how to work it on new doo-dads like all-in-one remote controls and DVD players. I’m teaching my son his hearing impaired communication manners at the same time he learns his table manners.

At work my hearing aids help me figure out what’s wrong with people, and not just by helping me hear what people say. Like everything else about myself, my disability reflects information about others back to me. “What are those?” says the manic patient, reaching into my body space to touch my ears.

“My hearing aides” I smile, placing her hands back in her lap.

“I can heal you, you know.”

Grandiose thinking, special powers; I check off the symptoms in my head.

Another example: a patient notices the aides’ remote control in my pocket and inquires what it is. After I explain, he says, “I’m sorry.” I’m not embarrassed, but I can tell that this is something he says about everything in his life, not simply a passing comment to a relative stranger: “I’m sorry.” Guilty, I remark to myself, thinking of some possible diagnoses: depression, personality disorders.

Children in my office regularly embarrass their parents by asking me “What are those things doing in your ears?” “Ear snails!” I exclaim, before answering seriously that I wear these just like Daddy wears his glasses.

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*Some names have been changed.