Losing It

'Take a seat, Mr Haig.'

I sat.

Next, a number of questions, which I answered as honestly and helpfully as I could.

Then, leaning forward: 'Okay, before we can carry out the test I just need to take a look...'

A few seconds later: 'Well...' and a sigh of disappointment.

Apparently my right eardrum was invisible, completely hidden by a wall of wax. The left side was partially blocked too. No hearing test today. I promised to get them sorted out asap, and rebooked.

A week's dosing with the excellently named Earol was followed by a short but satisfying micro-suction session at a back-alley clinic in town. The chirpy earwax removal chap took great delight in showing me the whopping nuggets of gloop thus extracted.

A few days later: 'Take a seat, Mr Haig.'

A much happier audiologist positively gushed at the sight of my straight, wide, apparently healthy - and now empty - ear canals.

'Wonderful! Wonderful! What a pair of beauties!'

The hearing test was straightforward enough. You wear headphones and listen for sounds, pressing the button on a hand-held pad whenever you hear one. I was occasionally fooled by the faint throb of a drill in a neighbouring property under renovation, but I doubt it made a lot of difference to the result. The result? Hmmm, yes. The result...

My audiogram - explanation below

In the chart above, the black lines represent my hearing thresholds for both ears at various frequencies, where O = right ear and X = left. The blue and red lines are nicked from a 2021 paper in The Lancet medical journal, and represent mean thresholds for Japanese men tested in a massive study involving thousands of participants. Blue = men in the age bracket 30-39; red = age 65-69.

According to the audiologist I saw my hearing is fairly typical of someone my age, and nothing to worry about. He reckoned that hearing aids were unnecessary. Back home I did a bit of googling and came across the Lancet paper. I am not quite in the 65-69 bracket yet, but already I seem to be slightly more deaf than a lot of Japanese blokes older than me. The good news is that I can hear speech okay, most of which registers in the lower frequencies. However, for me the higher frequencies are fading all too rapidly. The audiogram has frequency (in Hz) along the bottom axis and decibels up the side. A lot of birds - like Redwing and Firecrest, say - register at around 7-8000 Hz, which is pretty inconsiderate of them. But there is even worse news...

The decibel scale is not linear; it is logarithmic. As I understand it, what this means in practice is that an increase of ten decibels basically doubles the loudness of a sound. In other words, the ear perceives 30 decibels as twice the loudness of 20 decibels, and 40 decibels as twice the loudness of 30, and so on. Which means - looking at the audiogram above - that the faint 10-decibel Redwing call which the average 35 year-old Japanese birder can just about hear needs to be roughly THIRTY-TWO times as loud before my left ear can detect it.

Strewth!

It would be easy to see this in a very negative light, but I am grimly hanging on to my 'late middle-age' status while I still can. After moaning about one or more of the joyous delights that come with decrepitude, an elderly friend is fond of shaking his head and saying, 'Don't get old, Gavin.' To be honest though, I'll happily take that over the alternative.