Almost ten days ago now I had to go to the emergency room for severe and painful ringing in my ears, and I was diagnosed with an inner ear infection in both ears. Bleh. Anyhow, I have practically never gotten an ear infection and was unaware that it renders the infected ear almost totally unable to hear. Put an infection in both ears, and voila! you have almost instant, pretty severe deafness.
I recount this story not for pity's sake, as I am almost all the way recovered as I write this, but more to pass along an intriguing perspective I gained from the past week and a half. I had heard of people who would put themselves in the shoes of deaf people for a day by putting hearing protection on and then trying to interact with the world. I could never participate in such an exercise mainly for reasons of practicality. However, I finally had the experience forced upon me without my consent, and the result was as intriguing as it was terrifying.
The first thing I recall feeling was a sort of desperation. I wasn't supposed to lose my hearing, that happened to other people. Not me. Also, the onset of the deafness was so swift that it left me in a panic. I literally couldn't hear much of anything, including the doctor asking me what was wrong.
As the week wore on, it became clear that the deafness was going to be a pretty standard fixture of the next week or so. The panic and desperation distilled slowly down to a kind of resigned calm, where I and the pain in my ears lived in a weird sort of coexistence that did not feel real.
And that's when it finally hit me: the sense of isolation. People who tried to talk to me eventually would get frustrated that I had to ask them to repeat things over and over again. I couldn't hear movies playing, could barely hear my wife in the car, and couldn't hear my alarm clock in the morning. My temporary disability was, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely debilitating.
I finally had that experience I hear people with various disabilities speak of sometimes, the experience of being crushingly lonely. It is hard to express that feeling, but it is real. I gained a new sense of what an old person in a nursing home must feel like, half-deaf and unable to interact properly with others. I felt that loneliness first hand, and it was not good.
Of course, I have people that love me who wouldn't abandon me in that sort of situation. I have a fantastic wife who made everything run smoothly while I was laid up. I have great parents who pleasantly put up with my need for repeated questions and comments. I am surrounded by love.
But the truth remains that many other people are not surrounded by love. They are abandoned and hopeless, many times for things beyond their control. Knowing a tiny slice of that loneliness and separation makes it not only encumbent upon me to be more aware of those people myself, but to get others to pay attention to them as well. I believe it was Mother Teresa who said that the greatest plague of modern man is loneliness. She would know. It was her job to fix it. So should it be ours.
