Deafness, a small introduction

Hey, you! Welcome back :). Today a little piece about my hearing loss. I won't write down everything, so if you have any questions or things you want to know after reading this, you can ask me anything! I like it when people ask me questions ;).

What's the case?

After the meningitis I became (almost) deaf. With my left ear I'm completely deaf, and with the right one I can hear about 10-15% of what someone is saying. Unfortunately a hearing aid doesn't work, we've tried it several times, but it did not help. Probably because the damage is so deep inside of my head (the auditory-nerve), but we're not sure because they (the hospital) can't do any research on that level. That sucks a lot...

The weird thing is, 'normal' people hear the low-pitched tunes good, and lose the higher-pitched ones (think of an elderly person); I can hear the high tunes way, way better. I just completely can't hear the lower tunes, which is very weird. Not that I can hear the higher tunes 100% fine though, I can like hear 15% of it.

This hearing loss makes me dependent on lip-reading. Without seeing the mouth/face of a person, I can't hear anything. Most people will automatically start speaking louder as soon as I tell them that I'm deaf; that doesn't work. It doesn't matter if you scream or whisper, if I can't see your mouth, the result will be the same.

By the way, I can hear women better than men, because men (usually) have lower voices than women. 

My ears are not used to not-hearing. This makes them making a lot of sounds which don't even exist: this is called tinnitus. I have so, so, soooo much tinnitus. From very high beeps to low bass-tunes to whirlwinds. It's super frustrating. If you want to hear an example of what tinnitus could sound like, you can check out the video down below. If it doesn't work, here's a link: Tinnitus. If you combine all of these sounds together, you might have an idea of what I hear every day, all day long.. (imagine what it's like to sleep)

Music

Because of this hearing loss, I'm not able to listen to music anymore. Music has always been one of the most important things in my life, so now it's one of the things I miss the most. Now, I can only hear the high-tunes of a beat, the
sounds like clapping your hands.

It's weird, when I start to play my playlist of 2018, with all the songs I know completely by heart, that I just can't hear anything of the songs, don't even recognize the songs anymore. Do you know that pain in the area of your heart, that you feel when someone says something very very mean or just something that hurts you very much? That's the feeling I get when I start doing things like listening to music. 

Of course you can say like, why do you still do it? Well, it's just like, sometimes you're in a mood in which you just want to chill and listen to music. Those moods never went away, so I still try to listen to it, always hoping for a miracle to happen, so I can hear music again (although I know that won't happen).

Because of my deafness, I also became very lonely. I will tell you more about that in another post. It's starting to get a little much by know, I guess haha, so this is it for now.

If you have any questions or things you want to know, let me know!! I will tell more about the situation in another blog.

See you later!

Terry