After he pushed the button a bunch of times and she made notes on the computer, she gave him another test that checked how loud a noise could get before it became painful.
The next test included a recorded voice that spoke certain words at various speeds and different volumes. His job was to repeat whatever he heard. The voice had a syrupy southern quality, which drew out some of the sounds and made them harder to distinguish.
Finally, the audiologist did a repeat of the tone test, then took the earphones off him.
“All right, sir,” she said. “We’re all done. Take a look.”
She turned the computer’s flatscreen around to show him a pair of charts. “This one is your left ear, the other is your right. The red lines on both charts represent the norms. The blue lines show the results of your tests. As you can see, for your left ear you’ve dipped some in the high frequencies, but you are pretty solid in the middle and bass range. Over here in the right ear, however, it’s not so good. You’ve dropped way down on the high and middle ranges.”
He could see that easily enough. “What does it mean?”
“Well, I’m not a doctor. Your physician should be the one to discuss this with you. I’ll send these results to his flatscreen right away.”
“Come on,” Howard said. “You do this for a living. You know what it means.”
She paused, then nodded. “Okay. My guess is you are having trouble hearing people talk, or the phone ring, or the high notes on your old Ray Charles CDs. This chart shows that, and it also shows why. It’s pretty clear that you’ve damaged your hearing.”
Howard frowned. He’d expected that, of course, but he still didn’t like hearing it. “Will it heal?” he asked. “Will it get any better at all?”
She shook her head. “No, sir. Not on its own.”
“What about fixing it, either medically or surgically? Is that an option?”
She shook her head again. “No, sir. Not in this case. It’s just not that bad a loss, not nearly enough to warrant a cochlear implant. You’d have to be almost stone deaf for that. And we haven’t figured out how to regenerate the nerves in the labyrinth via stem cell or gene therapy. So there’s no medicine that will heal them. It’s a lot like scar tissue, really.”
He started to ask another question, but before he could, she added, “We can fix it, though, so you will hear pretty much as well as you used to.”
That sounded interesting. “How?” he asked.
“Electronic augmentation.”
Howard felt his stomach twist. A hearing aid, he thought, just like his grandfather used to wear. He shook his head. He was only in his forties, after all. He wasn’t ready for some big, ugly lump behind his ear. What would be next? A cane? A walker? He shook his head again, pushing the mental image away.
She could tell what he was thinking, of course. She must have seen that same reaction countless times.
She opened a drawer, reached into it, and pulled out a device exactly like Howard remembered his grandfather wearing. As big as his thumb, it was a big, pale, fleshy-colored thing, with a clear plastic hook on the end. It looked like a little oil can.
He shook his head again. If he wore that he might as well hang a neon sign around his neck: Yell at me! I’m deaf!
“This is what we used to use,” she said. “And we still use these, for patients with major loss.”
She reached back into the drawer. This time, though, when she brought her hand out and opened it to show him, she was holding a tiny, chocolate-colored button, no bigger than the tip of his little finger.
“And here is the state of the art right now, sir. A one hundred percent digital, multichannel, multiprogrammable MC — for mini-canal — signal processing auditory enhancement device. Digital feedback reduction, noise reduction, gain processing, and compression. This little model has a preamplifier, a twenty-three-bit analog-to-digital converter with a one hundred and thirty-eight decibel dynamic range. The processor chip runs a hundred and fifty million operations per second, with all-digital output to the transducer.”
Howard just stared. He knew some of the terms, but not all of them.
“The battery is good for about a week, and it can be programmed to your specific hearing loss and crosscoupled to separate channels. What that means is that if you are in a crowded room full of people jabbering, you’ll be able to hear the guy next to you when he talks. And if you want to listen to music at home alone, you push this little button here and it will shift to a different frequency so you can hear the high notes. Watch.”
She turned away, did something he couldn’t see, then looked back at him.
“I have one in my ear. You see it?”
Howard looked. “No.”
“Right. And you’re looking for it. Nobody will know you’re wearing it unless you lean over and point it out to them. And best of all, sir, it will bring your hearing pretty close to what it was before. Not perfect, but not far off.”
“Wow,” he said.
She grinned. “Yes, sir. We squirt a little rubbery goop in your ear canal, let it set, then take a mold from that so it can be custom fitted. You’ll just tuck it in every morning — if you choose to take it out when you sleep. You don’t really have to. It’s all automatic after that. You’ll want to remove it to shower, though. These things are not really waterproof, but if you get caught in the rain, it will be okay.”
She pulled the device out of her ear. “See, here’s how you turn it off. Open the battery door like this. When you need to change the battery, you just pop it out like so. Put a new one in, close it, and it’s ready to rock.”
He had to admit, he was pretty impressed. “And do I have to sell my house to buy this technological miracle?”
“They run about twenty-eight, twenty-nine hundred retail, sir, but under the Net Force insurance you only copay ten percent. Two hundred and eighty dollars, give or take. Buy the batteries at Costco or on-line and they’ll cost about fifty cents each. It also comes with a maintenance and loss insurance plan free for two years, fifty bucks a year thereafter.”
He nodded. “And this will do the trick?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “I believe it will.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, sir. And nobody will be yelling at you like you thought you had to do to your grampa, because they won’t know it’s there.”
He grinned. “Am I that obvious?”
“It’s a youth culture, General. Nobody wants to be thought of as old and decrepit. When that slew of baby boomers started hitting their fifties and sixties a few years back, having trouble hearing after all those years of rock and roll, the demand for things like this skyrocketed. They are working on a model now that will run off a capacitor whose power comes from normal movement. Completely sealed. Put it in and forget about it. Just take it out every three or four months to clean your ears, then pop it back in. Until then, however, this will do the job. Welcome to the future, sir.”
He smiled again. Well. It could be worse. And wearing a little electronic gizmo was better than cupping your hand around your ear and saying “Eh?” like some deaf old fart, wasn’t it?
A hearing aid. He still couldn’t believe it, though. And no matter how high-tech or marvelous they were, he certainly wasn’t happy about it.