Hearing

Hearing

One of the thing that seems to be sensible in this coronavirus days is wearing a face mask. It stops the spread of the disease especially as there's research to show the virus enters the body through the lungs into the blood stream. My wife made us all lovely face masks pretty early into lockdown as she's handy with a sewing machine and had a load of material knocking about. However for me masks a nightmare. I'm not on some weird Donald Trump tip worrying about my image or my freedom to choose. Instead I have bad hearing and having people's mouths covered up makes me really hard for me to work out what they're saying. Back when I was about 5 I had a really bad bout of measles. It's not that my folks were anti-vax but this was over 40 years ago and there just weren't vaccinations for it offered then. After this bad case of measles it was noticed I had bad hearing so was sent for tests. It seems the measles damaged my nerves from my ears to my brain. So it's not degenerative, it doesn't get worse at all. It's just bad hearing. The odd part is only certain nerves are damaged which means, in layman's terms, I have a bass ear and a treble ear. Usual bad hearing is a general loss of volume but for me it is just certain frequencies I can't hear. As a schoolboy I pretty much carried on and pretended I didn't have bad hearing (as being at school the last thing you wanted to be was “different”). Though as an adult I came round to it and am much more open about it. Then technology caught up and meant hearing aids were available that boosted just the frequencies I needed instead of being just a general volume boost. I even can control them using bluetooth from my phone to turn the volume up or down. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this or how to finish it other than if you're wearing a mask and someone is looking baffled at you it could be me. Also people that choose not to vaccinate their kids against measles are utterly despicable.