This is for the birds!

I woke up this morning and I could hear the birds!! I was so excited. It’s been a while since I’ve heard them. I have a progressive hearing loss, which lately has become progressively worse. I felt like I was functioning pretty well when my loss was in the “moderate to severe” category, but as I’ve progressed to “profound,” I realize just how much I really don’t hear. 

Two weeks ago something happened. I thought I was perhaps congested or some other such thing. I felt like my head was in a barrel. Everything sounded muffled. A trip to the ENT showed no such luck. Something happened alright; the rest of my hearing was pretty much gone. I am now profoundly deaf in one ear and severe to profound in the other. In addition, this new round of not hearing has brought a whole new slew of tinnitus sounds. A new online deaf friend calls what she hears “a swarm of locusts.” That is an exact perfect description for what I hear. Well, it’s one of the sounds I hear. There’s a little madman in my right ear playing a triangle….ding, ding, ding, ding. 

So, today, I woke to the birds. I thought perhaps I had been healed of my hearing loss during the night! Oh happy day! I got up, brushed my teeth--to soundless water running, sigh…no healing; apparently just a new tweety noise in my head. I went downstairs to wake up my husband, who had fallen asleep in the basement on the sofa with his favorite feather pillow. He was covered in feathers, as was pretty much everything in the room. Guess we were both thinking about birds.  Welcome to my deaf life.