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Image: Max Brodel

Consid­er­ing that the com­bined age of me and my friend Frank (now my hus­band, Frank) is 185 years, it’s no sur­prise that hear­ing aids play a dom­i­nant role in our daily lives.

We both wear them; I in both ears, and Frank in the ear that works. That one has forty per­cent hear­ing, and still does its job bet­ter than my two. Long before I knew Frank, a rene­gade nerve in his face that causes sui­ci­dal pain, known as tic douloureux, required surgery. On the first try the sur­geon sev­ered the wrong nerve, and when Frank woke up from the oper­a­tion he was deaf in his right ear.

Deafness is con­gen­i­tal in my fam­ily. In her later life my mother became “stone deaf,” which she described by say­ing, “I can’t even hear the sound of my own voice.” Lip-reading lessons enabled her to tell us what a per­son sit­ting at the next table in a restau­rant was say­ing, a mar­gin­ally inter­est­ing exer­cise not worth the sin of eaves­drop­ping. We com­mu­ni­cated with her mostly by writ­ing on a lined note pad that she car­ried around; for exam­ple (dur­ing a visit to a zoo): “Does this camel look like Aunt Belle?” She thought it did.

At that time, the 1970s, hear­ing aids had a nasty habit of buzzing unex­pect­edly. After my father died my mother, urged along by the rest of the fam­ily, con­tin­ued timidly to attend the Thursday night per­for­mances of the sym­phony orches­tra in Cleveland, Ohio, as she and my father had done since it was founded in 1918. Whoever sat next to her in what had been my father’s seat was instructed to tell her right away if her hear­ing aid was buzzing so she could turn it off. In the mid­dle of a per­for­mance I attended with her, it buzzed while the music was play­ing, and I had just tapped her elbow and pointed to her hear­ing aid when she received an anony­mous note, deliv­ered hand over hand from sev­eral rows for­ward, which read: “Your hear­ing aid is mak­ing so much noise that it is ruin­ing our enjoy­ment of the music. Please turn it off.” She had done that already, at my sig­nal. She felt so humil­i­ated that she never went to another concert.

The hear­ing aids avail­able now are much bet­ter, even though the racket of my auto­mo­bile tires rolling on the road and the back­ground music in restau­rants are so mind-boggling that Frank leaves his one hear­ing aid at home with sus­pi­cious frequency.

At home Frank and I are mutu­ally sym­pa­thetic to the oblig­a­tion to face one another and speak loudly; or, when we are away, to sup­ply each other with new bat­ter­ies when we for­get them; but we have no defence against the inde­pen­dent wan­der­ing behav­iour of our hear­ing aids. They are always some­place else. I prob­a­bly have spent one per­cent of my life, close to a whole year, look­ing for the damned things.

First comes the chill­ing rev­e­la­tion that we don’t know where they are. All other activ­i­ties are put on hold until we find them. When we are about to go out and I sud­denly say, “I can’t leave until I find my hear­ing aid,” I am touched by the way Frank imme­di­ately joins my search; tear­ing the bed apart or get­ting down on the floor to look, an act of supreme nobil­ity since nei­ther of us can be sure of get­ting up again with­out call­ing 911.

For those for­tu­nate enough never to have seen hear­ing aids, they are roughly the size of a small thumb, rang­ing from less than one inch to almost two inches, depend­ing on the style. Some are so small that they fit neatly into the ear cav­ity, while oth­ers, like mine, con­sist of machin­ery in a small curved con­tainer behind the ear, con­nected by a plas­tic tube to a custom-designed mould in the ear. The moulds are thought­fully skin-coloured, which makes them even more dif­fi­cult to locate once they have escaped.

Three cheers for the bat­ter­ies that make the whole thing work, but they are untrust­wor­thy. Their slip­pery round quarter-inch size invites trou­ble. Putting them in and tak­ing them out of the tiny recep­ta­cles in the hear­ing aid requires del­i­cate fin­ger work and furi­ous con­cen­tra­tion. Once the bat­tery has made its get­away to the floor, usu­ally among the dust bun­nies under the bed, or into the nether­world under a car seat, for­get it.

My first encounter with van­ish­ing hear­ing aids was sin­is­ter. I went inno­cently to bed, turned out the light as usual and, as I laid my head down on the pil­low, I removed my hear­ing aids. I reached over in the dark toward the famil­iar small table by my bed and dropped them there.

The fol­low­ing morn­ing I could not find them any­place. The search ranged through­out the house: under seats and couch cush­ions, over and under rugs, on desks and tables, in the laun­dry bas­ket, in the refrig­er­a­tor, stove, garbage. Frank and I were both exhausted and I was in tears. Where oh where had they gone?

I went back to the bed­side table to get a Kleenex and shrieked, “Here they are!” My hear­ing aids were just where I had dropped them in the dark — in the glass of water that I kept by my bed. Goodbye hear­ing aids.

Much too soon after that, I bade farewell to another hear­ing aid that made an unfor­tu­nate laun­dry trip in the pocket of a skirt. It met its end either in the washer or in the dryer; I will never know which.

I do not leave liq­uid by my bed any more, and I check all pock­ets at the wash­ing machine, but it has taken me years to stop drop­ping my hear­ing aid in my lap when I use my cell phone in the car. That phone is an old instru­ment, with­out frills, on which I hear bet­ter than any other tele­phone I have; but first I have to remove my hear­ing aid and press the phone to my ear.

I am absent-minded, so I was not too sur­prised one after­noon when I put my hand up to my right ear and found it empty, after I had been sit­ting in my doctor’s wait­ing room for an hour. I ran down to the street, say­ing a small prayer in the ele­va­tor that my hear­ing aid was still in one piece wher­ever it had fallen from my lap when I got out of the car.

Was I ever lucky! The hear­ing aid had been sit­ting for an hour about two feet from my car on the open street, and nobody had dri­ven over it or stepped on it! After I did the same thing on a ferry boat, I decided not to push my luck fur­ther. I have made a firm rule that when I use my cell phone, I never take my hear­ing aid out of my ear with­out drop­ping it into my open purse. I would like to say that I have kept to that rule, but I am trying.

At least that’s bet­ter than what I heard in the locker room at the swim­ming pool from a friend whose fish­er­man hus­band is as deaf as I am. “Ray was tying up our boat the other day,” she said, “and both hear­ing aids fell out of his pocket overboard.”

Another friend described an anguished search of her mother’s apart­ment for a lost hear­ing aid. “It was sus­pected that Mum’s Boston ter­rier had eaten it,” she said, “and in the end, it turned out to be true.”

Frank’s one hear­ing aid is as crafty as my two. One of his grand­sons got mar­ried last sum­mer, and as we left the house with plenty of time to arrive for a 3:30 p.m. cer­e­mony, I said, “Have you got your hear­ing aid?”

“No I haven’t,” he said, and the fran­tic search began. A dear friend had been super­vis­ing our prepa­ra­tions for the great event and all three of us began look­ing through every inch of the house.

When the clock hands reached 3:30 p.m., I said in a low voice to our friend, “I haven’t got the nerve. We’ve looked every­place else. Find Frank, wher­ever he is. Don’t ask him. Just look in his ear.”

And that’s where it was. When we arrived at the wed­ding, both of Frank’s sons were stand­ing in the dri­ve­way with their arms out­stretched as if to catch us as we flew in. This was a large out­door wed­ding and the guests were seated on the grassy hill­side beside the road, with all heads turned toward us. We were lit­er­ally lifted from the car into our seats, and the cer­e­mony began.

The most eccen­tric and, yes, fear­some con­fronta­tion with my free-spirited aids occurred when one of them took advan­tage of me on a hos­pi­tal oper­at­ing table last sum­mer to leave while I was hav­ing surgery, a total hip replace­ment. I needed to talk to the anaes­thetist, a shad­owy crea­ture I had met only once, and the oper­at­ing table was my last chance. After a sat­is­fac­tory con­ver­sa­tion, I curled up on my right side on the table and took a snooze while the sur­geon did his work. I woke up still on the table and touched my right ear.

Empty!

As the atten­dants were prepar­ing to remove me, I said as loudly as I could, “One of my hear­ing aids is gone.”

One of the nurses pat­ted my hand gen­tly. “Too late,” she said. “It must have been swept away. There’s no way to find it.”

My son Jay came to see me in the recov­ery room. “Run, don’t walk to the Hearing Centre where I bought my hear­ing aid,” I said. “I think it’s still under the war­ranty but there’s no time to be lost.” I was right. It had one more week to run.

Recently, Frank and I were sit­ting in a restau­rant in Vancouver on a rainy day and I casu­ally said to him, “I don’t see your hear­ing aid. Did you for­get it?”

He clapped his hand to his ear. “Oh! I left it at home,” he said.

“Do you know where?”

He looked a lit­tle funny. “As a mat­ter of fact, I do. I left it on the deck on a rose bush.”

“What’s it doing there?” I said. I looked out the win­dow. “It’s rain­ing here. I won­der if it’s rain­ing at the house. Might I ask why you left your hear­ing aid on a rose bush?”

“I for­got to take it off when I went in the pool this morn­ing at Aquafit. So when we got home I thought I’d bet­ter give it a chance to dry out. I put it on a rose bush in the sun. When we left, I for­got all about it.”

“Which rose bush?”

“The one in the big pot on the deck, just under the liv­ing room window.”

I took out my hear­ing aid, care­fully dropped it in my purse and pulled out my cell phone. I called my won­der­ful neigh­bour. “Hello Vera,” I said, “Is it rain­ing up there?”

“It was such a beau­ti­ful day,” she replied. “But it’s rain­ing now.”

“I have a rather odd favour to ask,” I said. “Frank thinks he left his hear­ing aid on a rose bush under the liv­ing room win­dow.” I could hear Vera laugh­ing. “Please, would you mind run­ning over and tak­ing it out of the rain?”

“I watched Frank do that,” Vera said. “I saw him put his hear­ing aid care­fully on the rose bush, so I know which one it is. I asked him what he was doing and he said, ‘I’m leav­ing it there to dry.’”

Vera still laughs when­ever she tells about how she found the lit­tle hear­ing aid on the rose bush, inno­cently swing­ing from a branch. It was quite dry, in spite of the rain.