One thing that’s always puzzled me about Arthur, with his incipient deafness and his difficulty with interaction: he still listens constantly to his little audiobooks, on his circa mid-2000’s Apple iPod Nano. In the times when I’ve overheard, it’s always the same books – over and over. The mystery is that given his apparent deafness and difficulty understanding, I don’t quite get what he’s getting out of them. I feel like it’s just some kind of reassurance and a way to “tune out” the confusing external reality.
We got his new hearing aids and had a new hearing test on Monday at the VA. It was a long and exhausting (for Arthur) appointment.
The new hearing aids have a feature that is something he’s long wanted: a nice low-tech, intuitive way to listen to his audiobooks through the hearing aids directly. He can just plug the physical audiojack into a little dedicated dongle, and it works “automagically.”
There’s an unanticipated problem, though – for me, not for him. For me, with his old way of listening to audiobooks, with the distinctive white Apple corded earbuds dangling from his ears, I had a nice easy way to tell whether he was “tuned out” or not. This could impact the strategies I needed to use to make myself heard and understood. Now, as he listens through his hearing aids, I have no way of knowing when he’s tuned out. And it makes a BIG difference in terms of being able to get through to him. And bearing in mind, regardless of whether he listens through ear buds or through his hearing aids, he’s often quite reluctant to turn off his audiobooks – he wants to multitask and somehow carry on his conversation and still keep listening. This rarely goes well. Then you have to ask him to turn off his audiobook – and that makes him annoyed and grumpy, which changes the way communication proceeds, too.
Generally speaking, communication with Arthur continues to become increasingly fraught and frustrating, in other words.
Life goes on. I’m pleased that the VA didn’t try to force us into any follow-up appointments. One revelation from the new hearing test: the audiologist is confident that much of Arthur’s hearing loss is the result of damage to the middle ear, instead of the more typical inner ear. In one sense, this is actually good news. Damage to the middle ear is not, generally, progressive, unlike inner ear deafness. It’s a breakdown in the ear’s ability to transmit sound to from the eardrum to the inner ear. With Arthur, we could speculate that it’s due to the 40+ years of pressure changes, up and down in helicopters. I also speculate that it has to do with his infamous “performative, world-destroying sneezes” – where he sneezes in such a way as to maximize loudness and air movement through the passages in his head, and which he’s always insisted are good for him (?!).
Ah well.
Yesterday, we stayed home and I was very lazy. I spent a lot of time talking in circles with Keith, reminiscing about old times in Humboldt – times when I was a child and he and Juli were my sister’s and my babysitters. Keith is hard to understand, because his memory issues are at a level where you can end up having the same conversation 20 or 30 times, over and over. And he seems to have lost most of his verbs and nouns and names and specificity. “The place when we did the thing was good. I really liked that!” Arthur gets mad trying to make sense of him, and staggers off, disgruntled, to lie down upstairs on his guest bed.
Today I kind of want to go shopping for a new phone – to try to prevent some of the frustrations my current phone has provided, related to my failure at international roaming (In Australia last month), related to the lack of wifi-calling functionality (for coping with Juli’s home being “out of cellphone range”), etc. We’ll see – I’m not sure the phone-salespeople are going to be sufficiently reassuring regarding these functionalities to cause me to spring the big bucks to buy a new one.
More later.
A decorated tree.
