My right ear hasn’t worked since I suffered a brain injury in middle school. Hearing on only one side makes life more complicated. For the nearly 25 years my wife and I have known each other, whenever we want to have a conversation, we need to make sure she’s on my good side.
“Left is best” is how she remembers it.
So it definitely broke the rules for us to sit on a blue plastic couch in a busy waiting room, with a loud TV to my left and my wife, Jaime, on my right. But we were at my audiologist’s office, following the doctor’s orders: Make small talk.
Jaime caught me up on the kids’ schedules and our weekend plans, then weighed our dinner options. It was the kind of conversation we’d had thousands of times.
But I had never been able to hear it from this direction. Now I could.
It seemed like such a small thing, but it felt profound. A lifetime of single-sided deafness had trained me to avoid this exact situation — a loud noise on my left, someone talking on my right.
And yet here we were, conversing casually like a normal couple that didn’t have to constantly triangulate seating arrangements.
I told Jaime to scoot over, and she slid down to the other end of the blue couch and kept talking. I could still hear her. Then she moved to a row of chairs about 20 feet away. The TV was still loud, and I could still hear her.
Just like that, a couple of small electronic devices tucked behind my ears changed how I experienced the world.
There are many forms of hearing loss, some more difficult to correct than others. Mine is particularly tricky.
The concussion I suffered in middle school destroyed my right auditory nerve, making most forms of hearing assistance ineffective for me.
It was a stupid accident. Some classmates and I were goofing around in the auditorium, and someone knocked me off the stage. As I fell, my head hit one of the built-in desks in the front row, knocking me unconscious. I’m not sure for how long.
Today, we understand the danger of head injuries like that. But back in the 1980s, I wasn’t even sent to the nurse’s office.
I first noticed something was wrong that afternoon as I walked home from school. A plane flew overhead, and the engine sounded weird, in a way that I couldn’t describe. But it wasn’t until the next morning, when my mother had to yell from my bedroom door to wake me up for school, that I knew I had serious trouble.
I had been sleeping on my left side, and I hadn’t heard my clock radio alarm going off.
We went to the hospital, and doctors determined that I had a type of traumatic brain injury known as a contrecoup, which is French for “counterblow.”
The impact of the fall had rocked my brain back and forth, crushing my auditory nerve against the side of my skull. Signals from my right ear can’t reach my brain through the ruined nerve, which won’t heal.
The official name of my condition is single-sided deafness, which is a serious form of bilateral hearing loss, though I’ve always just referred to it as being half deaf. People with single-sided deafness struggle to decipher speech, screen out background noise and localize sounds, all of which I’ve experienced on a daily basis.
I’m sure the doctors explained all this to me back then, but I still remember being surprised the first time a teacher clapped me on the right shoulder in the school hallway. He was saying my name and thought I was ignoring him. Amid the chatter of classmates and slamming lockers, I didn’t realize he was there.
I’m still pretty easy to sneak up on. My skull blocks sound waves coming from the right, preventing them from reaching my left ear. It’s called the head shadow effect.
Every noise I do pick up seems as if it’s coming from my left side, giving me no real spatial awareness. My world is a sonic blur. When someone shouts to me from across the street or tries to get my attention in the newsroom, I have to twist my head around to try to figure out where the sound is coming from.
The usual follow-up of “Over here!” doesn’t help.
Every dinner out, every birthday party, every sporting event or bar mitzvah is a chessboard where I calculate moves: Sit at the right side of the table. Keep my back to a quiet corner. Pay more for a seat on the right aisle so no one can sit on my bad side.
The mental stress can be overwhelming. My nerves fray in a noisy environment. I’ll get home from work and a long bus commute feeling exhausted. My family has learned to let me hide away sometimes for an hour or so to recover.
It’s called listening fatigue, and medical studies have linked it to anxiety, depression, social isolation and increased risk of suicide.
For most of my life, I coped pretty well. But over the last few years, things felt as if they were getting worse. I became anxious, tired and irritable more easily. I started skipping more events, or ducking out early. I left my wife behind at a good friend’s birthday party when their house got too loud.
In the newsroom, I had to stop joining video calls during breaking news stories, because I couldn’t process the input from so many sources. At home, any background noise at all — running water in the sink, the vent on the kitchen stove — would block out the voices of my wife and kids while I was cooking dinner.
For the first time in decades, at age 54, I decided to see an audiologist again.
Sitting in an audio testing booth, I raised my hand when I could hear the doctor play a tone or a beep through special earphones. I vividly remembered doing the same thing for specialists after my head injury more than 40 years ago.
When the volume was turned up on the right, I could feel my skull vibrating from the loudest tones. But I couldn’t hear them.
The tests confirmed what I had feared. Now, along with the flat line indicating severe hearing loss in the right ear, another dip on the chart showed deterioration in my “good” ear, too.
This happens to a lot of people in their 50s and 60s, the audiologist, Dr. Phyllis Schaffer-Cohen, said. And after decades of single-sided deafness, I was more vulnerable than most, to both additional hearing loss and other associated issues.
“You’re at a real disadvantage,” she said. “No hearing in one ear, reduced hearing in the other.”
After the accident, the doctors told me and my parents that there was nothing anyone could do. The nerve damage was permanent, and the hearing aids available at the time wouldn’t help.
Even years later, when cochlear implants became common, I wasn’t a candidate. For decades, the only options for my condition were awkward, expensive and invasive. That had changed, Dr. Schaffer-Cohen told me in January.
She recommended that I try a system called contralateral routing of signal, or CROS. I’d wear a receiver on my right side, and it would pick up sounds, transmitting them to an amplifier on my left ear. I still wouldn’t know which direction to turn, but I would hear more.
CROS was around when I had my accident, but systems back then were primitive, requiring transmission wires across the back of a user’s head, or sometimes hidden in thick glasses. Even later, when they got smaller, the sounds often didn’t sync. Many users gave up in frustration.
But in the last decade, Dr. Schaffer-Cohen said, CROS hearing aids had improved, even incorporating artificial intelligence to help measure head movements and make adjustments. She now recommends them to patients like me. I did some research, and the medical literature bore her out.
Two weeks later, I went with Jaime to Dr. Schaffer-Cohen’s office at Summit Health in Montclair, N.J. She said the best test drive was to have a normal, everyday conversation with my wife.
I tucked sleek black devices roughly the size and shape of garlic cloves behind my ears. The doctor usually sent couples outside, but it was frigid that day. Her waiting room would have to do.
With the television blaring a TLC program on my left and Jaime chatting normally on my right, I stared straight ahead, keeping my good ear from turning toward her.
The device behind my right ear was picking up her voice and broadcasting to its twin on the left, which routed it through a tiny speaker on the end of a wire snaking into my ear canal.
“Do you know how weird this is?” I asked her.
It was weird for her, too. We decided to take them.
I wanted to bring the hearing aids home right away, but Dr. Schaffer-Cohen needed insurance approval first.
Good CROS systems aren’t cheap; mine ran about $5,000 from a supplier called Oticon. UnitedHealthcare covered roughly three-quarters of that amount. Apple, Bose and other big names in audio make hearing aids now, too. Some are available over the counter.
Steve Martin and other celebrities helped test a new system from a start-up called Fortell that uses A.I. to screen out background noise. At $6,800 a set, it’s even pricier than mine.
Back in Dr. Schaffer-Cohen’s office a few weeks after my tryout, I sat across from her, learning how to operate and clean the new devices. They looked a lot different from the chestnut-size beige hearing aids my grandfather used to wear.
“That’s what most people remember,” Dr. Schaffer-Cohen said. “They were bulky. They whistled.” My grandfather was always taking his out, adjusting them to try to cut down the static.
The stigma has lessened as the devices have gotten smaller, and other kinds of wearables have grown more common. But it’s still there. “We sell a product that people don’t want,” the doctor said.
I jumped as a noise like a buzz saw whirred from under her desk. It was the printer, she told me, and pulled out papers for me to sign.
I had heard printers before. They didn’t sound like that.
I had the same thought driving home. My turn signals sounded like beating electronic drums. Over the next few weeks, I realized how much of the noisy world around me I had been missing.
I started a list on my phone of things that stood out:
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The sidewalk salt and gravel that crackled under my feet like firecrackers as I walked to the bus on a cold morning
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The incessant squish-squish of rubber-soled shoes in my building’s lobby on a rainy day
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The distracting noise of a colleague folding a piece of paper while sitting next to me during a meeting
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A conversation between two reporters sitting about 30 feet away, coming in loud and clear
Months later, I’m still hearing new things. Recently it was the sound of ice cubes clinking in a metal carafe as I poured cream into my coffee. Some of it is amazing. Some I could do without.
The listening fatigue hasn’t gone away. It might even have gotten worse. There’s more sound for my single ear to process now, and I still find myself in need of recovery time.
I often leave the hearing aids in their recharging cases on the weekends, or take them out on the bus home, to give myself a break. My wife can tell right away if I’m wearing them when I walk through the door at night, based on the volume of my voice.
I knew I was a loud talker. People have told me that for years. When I struggle to hear, my voice gets louder to compensate.
Once, my boss asked me to move into a conference room when I was on a video call, managing a busy news story. My voice kept getting louder, disturbing co-workers around me.
But it’s one thing to hear it from other people. It’s another to hear your noisy voice for yourself. And a little embarrassing.
“Do you realize how much less loud your voice is now?” a colleague asked me a few days after I started wearing the hearing aids. I do. And now I’m the one who sometimes finds others too noisy.
Fortunately, I can do something about that. My hearing aids came with an equalizer and volume control, in the form of an app on my phone.
The day I got them, my older son received his driver’s license. I rode with him to pick up his brother from swim practice and sat in the back seat on the short drive home.
In the front, with satellite radio playing a U2 song, they talked about school and sports. I adjusted the volume and mixed the audio settings so I could hear them better over the music.
When we got home, I showed my younger son how it worked. “Bro,” he said, impressed. “You got superpowers now!”
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