So, some suckage lately. The newish, rather-expensive hearing aid that I bought a year ago has been dying a slow death all semester. I took it in back in August and got into an argument with a fresh-out-of-school audiologist about whether or not there was anything wrong with it. I caved on that one, mostly because school was starting the next week and I didn’t want to ship it off to Chicago for a few weeks.

Don’t I have a backup, you ask? Yes, I do. But it’s had some issues with feedback that would cost some money to fix, and I’ve been feeling cheap lately. This is not something to feel cheap about — and usually I don’t — but I let myself slip into it this time.

My theory has been that I would send the backup off to be fixed this week or next, get it back in and running, and then send the primary one off over the break while I’m not in the classroom. Which would have worked just fine, had it not pretty much conked out on Thursday. Everything sounds like it’s underwater and about 1/4 of the volume it should be. Not so good for teaching.

So now I have an appointment for Monday morning and I’m using the backup, which has intermittent feedback that runs from squeaky to squalling so loud that anyone around me can hear it. It makes me crazy cranky. Poor Mister Husband. Obviously, I’m not willing or able to live with 16 hours a day of feedback, so this means I’ll probably end up leaving the aid out most of the weekend. This will make me functionally deaf.

In 29 years of deafness, I have never done this. I may be a severely/profoundly deaf person with only some of her hearing in one ear, but since I got my first hearing aid at 2? or 3?, I have never been without sound. The sound has had varying quality over the years, but it’s been enough to allow me to communicate and never bother to learn to sign.

I do not know how to be locked in my own little world of silence. I am very self-conscious about being able to hear, and almost never let myself be ‘seen deaf’ in public. (Compatriot G is the only colleague who’s ever seen me deaf, since we swim at the same pool. And even then, he persists in trying to talk to me. It’s rather funny, actually.) So I probably won’t go out of the house much unless the backup decides it’s in a better mood.

The next two days are probably not going to be much fun. But maybe I’ll get a chunk of writing done.