About the Time I Went Deaf

by James Altucher

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I had a great post all ready to go on what it’s like to be deaf. For the past year I couldn’t hear anything with my right ear. I could only hear out of the other ear if you basically yelled into it. I could barely talk on the phone. Everyone sounded like they were mumbling. At night when there were no noises I could close my eyes and hear this static that would get louder and louder. That static was the only sound I could hear. I was convinced I was going deaf. What a great blog post this was going to be, I thought.

I liked it. My kids would talk to me and I could ignore them. Sometimes Claudia would start to say something to me in the other room and I could vaguely hear but I would pretend not to. I was tuned into my own static. It was a wonderful feeling. I felt like the static was all over me, comforting me.

Then yesterday, after three months of delay and at Claudia’s insistence, I went to the doctor. “Ugh,” the doctor said after she spent some time peering into my right ear, “you should see what’s in here.” Then she started squirting hot water in my ear.

She got some tweezers and pulled something out of my ear. I swear to god it looked like someone had taken a shit in my ear. I said, “ugh, is that shit?”

“Ear wax,” she said.

“Yeah, but what is ear wax? Is it made out of the same stuff as shit?” I vaguely remembered Claudia telling me on a few occasions that my head smelled but I always thought it was my hair or something.

“Well,” the doctor said, and like doctors do, she had to figure out how to say something amazingly complex in layman’s terms, “the cells in your ear have secretions.”

“So it’s cell shit?” I said.

“Let’s just check the other ear,” she said. And that was that. She kept showing me what was pulling out of there. It was like my entire brain was being shat out of my ear.

But then suddenly I could hear. I think it had been about a year or so since I heard properly. Everyone’s voice sounded different. It was like when you play with the car radio and you turn it all the way to treble from where it was previously all the way at bass. I didn’t like it.

“I can hear things now,” I said.

“Isn’t that nice?” she said.

I went outside. Claudia was waiting for me. “I can hear things now,” I said.

“Really?” she said. She was disappointed. Later, she told me she had gotten used to talking about me behind my back with my daughters and laughing because they knew I wouldn’t hear it. She tried testing me. While she was in the kitchen and I was in the living room she started whispering. (As she proofread this she said, “we weren’t making fun of you! Well, just a little.”)

“I can hear you,” I said. “Darnit!” she said. She doesn’t curse. I felt like a superhero. If I wanted to I could charge up my superhearing and hear conversations miles away, particularly if people were talking about me.

Later that night I woke up at three in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. There were no sounds. I missed my static. I tried to listen for it but it was gone. Sometimes I had let the static rock me to sleep. I could almost feel it on my body it had been so loud. But now there was no static there. I also heard Claudia snoring.

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March 10, 2012

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