Say What?
Altitude-induced hearing loss transforms playful miscommunications into a new reality
I no longer hear around corners. If someone in the next room throws me a question or begins an anecdote, a dense jumble skitters through the air, conspicuously there but crazily mixed up and impenetrable. I imagine the sound vectors hitting the walls in the other room, as in pinball, careening to the ceiling, to the floor, bouncing off the furniture, then glomming onto gunk, never making it to me right side up and intact.
“Can’t hear you from another room,” I sing out.
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It’s not much of a problem. When the message sender strolls along the corridor and unreels a rerun face to face with me, I understand. If it’s Bu, my husband, he says his whatever again without a smidge of annoyance. Sometimes when one of us asks for a repeat—“What?”—the other echoes in a droll, upturned refrain—“What? What?”—and we laugh.
“Maybe we should learn sign language now. Or lip reading,” I once added. That wasn’t completely a joke. I bookmarked a website promising 10 steps to consummate lip reading.
With Bu, a communication misfire is as likely to be linguistic as acoustical. English is his third language, after Chinese and French. Our talk retains playful vestiges of his early English challenges, such as “chicken” instead of “kitchen” and “windshield” for eyeglasses that need cleaning. Though I’ve internalized some of his habitual mispronunciations, new ones baffle me for a moment, such as “leeks” for “licks” or vice versa. And confusions go both ways. When we were driving in Hawaii, I pointed upwards at a plane tilted toward a landing. “Airplane!” I noted. “Eggplant?” Bu echoed. That became our favorite private joke.
“Maybe we should learn sign language now. Or lip reading,” I once added. That wasn’t completely a joke. I bookmarked a website promising 10 steps to consummate lip reading.
Decades ago, I consulted an audiologist because I couldn’t hear the college students in my classroom. “Congratulations!” he told me. “Your hearing is totally normal. Your brain isn’t catching what the kids are saying because one: Young people mumble. Two: You’re teaching on the fourth floor with open windows onto busy Commonwealth Avenue. And three: Given what you described, right in front of the blackboard is probably an acoustic dead spot.” Maybe it was from him that I picked up the image of sound vectors caroming around uselessly instead of zooming to the listener.
My second hearing test, about five years ago, was more equivocal. Instead of asking me to identify words at various volumes and pitches like the other audiologist, this technician played pinpricks of noise into my earphones. Five minutes in, I squeezed my eyes shut. I was straining so hard I couldn’t tell whether I was asleep or awake, whether I was hallucinating dongs and peeps or hearing them. The testing was so phantasmic, the verdict of mild hearing loss went right into my mental wastebasket.
Objective measures of sound waves getting through my ears to my brain weren’t key, I decided. Since no one seemed to mind when I asked them to repeat something, where was the problem? I could always hear cars approaching when I walked the roads near home, as well as chipmunks and squirrels skittering through dried leaves. What mattered most was the relaxed good will Bu and I had about communicating with each other. Even when “What? What?” expanded to “What? What? What? What?” we laughed. Wayward vectors and tilts of the tongue: No big deal.
Then we took a road trip to the Rocky Mountains. In Colorado, we drove up to Independence Pass east of Aspen, nearly 12,100 feet high. Going down from that summit, my ears clogged and refused to pop. No matter how I swallowed, yawned or shifted my jaw, furry mufflers inside my head blocked almost all sound.
We registered at a motel that night. I could see the clerk’s mouth moving, but I heard none of her words. She seemed enveloped in a see-through soundproof booth. Clearly this resulted from the altitude, and it was scary as hell since I didn’t know whether the blockage was temporary or permanent.
The next day, I still couldn’t hear Bu asking me if I was okay. I just saw the grim concern in his eyes. Google’s AI indicated I was probably experiencing barotrauma, where Eustachian tubes struggle to equalize ear pressure with the surroundings.
We changed plans so we could get to lower altitude as soon as possible. In mid-Kansas at 1,200 feet, sometimes the clouds blocking my ears blew off. By the time we reached home in Massachusetts, everything Bu said in the car reached me unmuffled. Checking the audio setting on my phone’s Chinese language app, I confirmed I could now hear as well as before our trip. However, my attitude loosened.
Diminished hearing could damage my ability to maneuver in the world, I realized. As fun as “What? What?” was with Bu, I couldn’t count on a plumber, a stranger on the street or the Internet company rep on the phone patiently playing along. So were hearing flubs just a cheery kink, a winsome quirk I could shimmy around? Maybe not. Maybe not.
