This feels like the most appropriate image for this context. Speak no truth, speak no secrets.

A few weeks after the events of the last post, I talked to a friend at Stanford Medicine. It took a few weeks to work up to it because of some past damage. I hadn’t always gotten the best reactions when opening up about physical and mental health issues, even from family, so I was nervous about talking to anyone. However, this person is a medical professional and at the time, was involved in the programme that was part of my reason for being in San Francisco. That helped me open up.

To his credit, he gave exactly the right response: empathy and practicality. He didn’t sound exasperated or give me a “what now?”; he didn’t try to belittle the symptoms or experience; and he didn’t at any point say “at least”. We talked about the practical reality that I was unlikely to be able to afford a specialist consultation, even with the insurance I had, but he was really firm: I needed to see someone. I told him I had seen an audiologist in Germany, but he pointed out that was almost a year prior and things had obviously gotten worse. He said “Leave it with me” so I did.

I was really low around that time, but I kept silent about the reasons. There were people around me who’d made fun or rolled their eyes at other people’s complex mental and physical health stories and I was still worried about my visa status.

An aside: when you’re disabled, it’s rarely just one thing. In fact, it’s often a compounding series of things. Take the physical: there’s the main condition and its direct symptoms (for example, a traumatic brain injury causing coordination issues, hearing issues and headaches) and then there are the conditions caused by the symptoms (for example, minor to major injuries from stumbles falls, pain from uncoordinated movements and from those injuries, and fatigue). This can also apply to mental health issues or neurodivergence. I had learned that I was seldom actually safe to open up because it was seen as “a never-ending series of problems and complaints” or even “attention-seeking”. Sometimes I would naively forget. It would almost never go well.

After a couple more weeks, my friend came back to me. He’d arranged a visit with an audiologist in Stanford Medicine: a favour, nothing official. So that’s how I got my second hearing test. This time, it came back with confirmation of severe tinnitus; a moderately severe to severe hearing difference on the right side; and a moderate to moderately severe hearing difference on the left. The higher the sound frequency, the greater the difference. Above 6,000 Hz, I could only hear things if they were above 90 dB.

Those results were different to the German ones — “more severe” — but the advice was the same. The audiologist said I needed to get hearing aids. Without them, the tinnitus would continue and my ability to recognise sounds would worsen. She didn’t connect the dots for me on that and I didn’t understand that she was referring to the neurological auditory processing. I assumed she meant in-ear issues.

Always ask doctors what they mean if you don’t understand. Assume nothing.

Since I still couldn’t afford hearing aids, she donated some from her lab’s resources, on the condition that I’d get them back to her. When I first put them in… that’s a story in itself. Suffice to say it was a radical change.

But, given all my experiences up to that point, not one I was comfortable sharing with anyone beyond the friend who’d helped me get this far. I didn’t feel safe talking about it on top of things I’d recently shared and regretted. That decision would come back to haunt me but for now, I determined to keep silent.

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