Lucy Fur has nothing to do with this part of the story, but a photo of me looking banged up in a hospital bed isn’t something I want to hear. So here’s my heart living outside my body, Lucy.

Content warning: injury detail, information about hospital stay

I can remember the day that I became aware that my hearing had changed. I’ve talked to a few other late deafened people to compare experiences. It seems pretty consistent that the ones who remember roughly when it happened had some injury or event that divided their lives into before and after. That was the case for me.

I’d woken up in hospital. It was an afternoon in late July, 1998, and I was in a six-bed ward. What I initially interpreted as a buzzing medical instrument would turn out to be tinnitus. My first concern was the pain and paralysis in my body. Everything hurt, head to waist, but especially my head, left arm, left side. My legs wouldn’t move and my arm was immobilised. I could see other people in the room but everyone looked pretty out of it. I can’t remember what I thought was going on, but I couldn’t remember coming into hospital. I still don’t recall anything from the four-day period leading up to that afternoon, although my boyfriend of the time told me I was responsive and conscious during those days, just withdrawn.

Much later, we found out I’d had a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in addition to the more obvious broken bones, but at the time, the hospital had only identified broken ribs and vertebrae, broken shoulder and wrist, and injuries to the spleen, diaphragm and kidney. The focus was on those injuries and the fact that I couldn’t coordinate the movement of my legs or stand unaided. I remember a few days later, telling a nurse about the buzzing, whining and ringing in my ears, but nothing came of that conversation.

Back to that first day: a nurse came in to give us meds and I noticed his voice seemed off. It was somehow dull or flat, like the treble had been turned off, or at the very least, turned way down. I had to focus on his face to understand him. At the time, I thought this was due to the tinnitus, but over the coming days of interactions with visitors, nurses and doctors, I noticed it with everyone, even when the tinnitus was giving me a break. Everyone just felt flat. It was especially obvious with my boyfriend and my mum: the voices I knew best. Conversation was tiring because I had to focus so hard to make sense not so much of the words, but the tone.

Much later, in a different hospital, they’d discover the TBI. For the time being — the eight or so weeks in hospital and the next couple of months in a physio centre, I was just confused and frustrated that nobody was taking my questions seriously regarding difficulty hearing. I ended up shutting down around it (which was kind of a common reaction for me due to some childhood damage) and just not talking about the fact that I couldn’t hear the way I used to.

If I could go back and tell myself something, it would be to keep pushing for an answer on that particular issue. Now, I’d ask a doctor what was their reason for not including this symptom in their differential diagnostic process; I’d insist on seeing the case file so I could ensure that the information about difficulty understanding tone and speech was included; I’d push for a consultation with an audiologist or neurologist specialising in auditory processing disorder.

But for the time being, I just ignored it because everyone else was ignoring it.

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