Had a bad dream last night.

I dreamt of having a chance encounter with the very comely Mary Katharine Ham, the conservative journalist and blogger from Townhall.com. We were inside the lobby of a museum, and I somehow managed to engage her in a conversation. Only problem was, I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. My hearing aids completely failed to pick up her speech patterns, so I was left there to helpessly either nod while she talked or give blank stares. She quickly lost interest and blew me off, thinking I was a retard. All I could do was watch while she walked away, knowing I’d never be able to convince her otherwise.

Man was I depressed when I woke up. I think it’s obvious that the new hearing aids I’m trying out has been causing a lot of grief and anxiety for me. I want to hear better so I can engage people in conversation and not be afraid of putting myself out there so I could meet new people and escape this solitary bubble I’ve built for myself. But so far the aids just aren’t living up to expectations. I’m hoping programming adjustments will fix it, but I’ll have to wait till my next appointment before I’ll know for sure.

That dream reflected my worst fears too. People have a tendency to form opinions about me based purely on my disability, and if I can’t communicate with people normally, or have trouble understanding them, it’s automatically presumed that I’m either mentally underdeveloped, or to put it quite bluntly, that I’m just a flipping idiot with the equivalent IQ of a cardboard box. Nothing I say about anything will have any merit. I’m talked down to like I’m 7 years old, and there are times when I’m treated like one too.

Normally I wouldn’t care. But what scares me is the thought that no matter how many single women I meet, they will all look at me the same way because of my hearing loss: like I’m a retard. A handicapped piece of trash unworthy of their attention, much less their love. Whether it’s in dreams or in real life, it’s always been something that weighed heavily on my mind. I fear I’ll never live up to expectations, that I can never be the “perfect guy” they’re looking for, and for that I’ll always continue to be passed over until I’m well into my 70s, living alone in some dinky apartment somewhere with only a few dogs and cats to keep me company.

I can understand why some people settle now. Why they give up all hope and just hitch on to the first person who comes along that pays any kind of attention to them, even if that person ends up being the next Son of Sam. Will that be my future as well?

Crap, I gotta get these hearing aids fixed.

Hearing aid fittings seems to be more of an art than a science, evidently.

I noticed a clarity right away to the sounds I was hearing after being fitted with my new aids, but it’s possible these aids might be a bit underpowered for my degree of loss, so the audiologist wants to fit me with a more powerful version of the same aids next Friday.

My previous aids were very powerful, but failed to distinguish the most important sounds I really needed to hear, and while I was able to hear a broader range of sounds, I usually couldn’t make any sense of it. It was frustrating, especially in noisy situations, so I had basically given up on the idea that I could ever be able to intelligently talk to people outside the home and workplace.

With the new aids, despite being a bit underpowered (maybe), I was able to have conversations I hadn’t been able to have for years, and I was understanding speech far better than I ever used to, perhaps a little TOO well. Like with this coworker of mine, she just loves to talk, talk, talk, talktalktalktalk, and then when she’s not talking I’m betting she’s thinking about talking too. After hearing one of her usual 45 minute monologues, I was starting to think, maybe ignorance was bliss after all.

Digital hearing aids by the way are designed to continuously analyze and filter out background noises, while attempting to leave in the vocal sounds that we need to hear. I could tell my aids were doing the same thing, and the results could get weird at times. Sometimes a sound will be really loud, and then suddenly it will get soft or disappear altogether, the result of the processor deciding the sound was irrelevant and actively squelching it. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but the worst offense is when it comes to listening to music. It thinks just about everything I listen to is noise, and actively tries to suppress it all. The more I cranked up the volume, the more the aids cranked it down. Excuse me, but Steve Perry is NOT noise.

Fortunately, there are musical programs or similar settings you can upload to the hearing aid’s memory banks to compensate for this, so when I try out the next set of hearing aids next week, I’ll see if I can have those implemented as well. I almost got into it with my audiologist last time though. He’s a good guy, but he is way too used to dealing with people 50 years older than me and adjusting hearing aids according to their typical needs. I was ready to tell the guy, “Look, I have a life, or at least I’m trying to. I need adjustments that will allow me to hear everything, including music and crickets and doorbells and the sweet, dewy sounds of beautiful women whispering sweet nothings into my ear. I don’t need you setting these things thinking the only important sound I’m ever gonna need to know is the voice of my doctor telling me when I’m gonna die, a’ight??”

Sheesh.

Today I get fitted with my new $6000 hearing aids, the Destiny 1600 by Starkey. I’m not expecting miracles, or the ability to hear conversations from 100 yards away, but it would be nice to have a normal conversation in noisy settings for once without finding myself trapped in a puffy shirt situation.

I grew up hoping with each new generation of hearing aids that passed, that the technology would finally advance enough to give me the level of hearing I so desperately needed and wanted. I wanted to be able to hear someone whispering in my ear at the movie theater, or the sound of crickets chirping in the early hours of the morning, or the sound of my car jingling its merry little tune whenever the keys were left in the ignition. I wanted to be able to carry on a decent conversation in places like the subway, or at ballparks, or anywhere I happened to be.

But most of all, I no longer wanted to be afraid. Afraid that if someone asked me for help, I wouldn’t be able to tell them because I’d have no idea what they were saying. Afraid to approach beautiful women I saw in everyday life, not so much because I was shy and ugly, but also because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hear a single thing they said to me.

But after 27 years of wearing all different kinds of hearing aids from all different kinds of manufacturers, I still have yet to realize those dreams.

Will today be the day? After so many years of disappointments and heartaches, has the moment finally arrived where I can at long get my life back?

We shall see.

Man, so much to do, so little time to do it. Have to work early this week, get some balloons, a card and a gift together for some relatives’ wedding anniversary, get fitted for my new hearing aids, get my old hearing aids repaired, add my parent’s name to my bank account, create landing pages for my affiliate programs, purchase the SEOBook and give it a good read, and finally look around for some original shots I can take with my camera that might actually pass inspection with those anal microstock agencies.

I’m the kinda guy where if I have too many things on my mind, I tend to go….what’s the word… bat poopoo nutty. It’s a fact of life, but still, I HATE it when I have so many projects and errands I need to keep track of and run.

Oh well… gotta be a man about this… gotta be a man…

…Mommy please hold me.

I just came back from the audiologist and learned how much my new hearing aids would cost.

$5,700.

Fortunately health insurance is footing roughly half of the bill, but I’m still out close to 3 grand. @#%$ man, and I was getting so close to paying off my credit card debt too.

These are supposed to be the top of the line hearing aids though, something called the Destiny 1600 which is made by Starkey. Hopefully they’ll prove to be far superior to the ones I’m wearing now. Hell for 5700 bucks I better fricking believe they were sent from heaven.

One of the reasons why my social life is so nonexistent has been partly because I just couldn’t participate in conversations when it took place in noisy environments (which is basically everywhere). I could only go “Mmmmhmmm, uh huh, interesting, uh huh, mmhmmm” meanwhile not having the first bloody clue what the the person was saying. Sometimes I got lucky and could get away unscathed. Most of the time I didn’t. What surprised me about it all was that I thought it would be different once I went from analog to digital hearing aids. Nope. It was all still pretty much the same.

However, from what they say about these new hearing aids, they’re promising the moon. We’ll see. At the very least I’ll finally be able to get away from my current crook of an audiologist, who always found new and creative ways to pad her bills so I’d end up having to pay out of pocket for some of the repair expenses, even though my hearing aids were insured. Now I’m going back to the audiologist I had before her, a good guy who had always been straight with me, and whose warranty covered everything for 4 years and more (instead of the only two years that I had with this money grubbing ho). The only reason I went with another audiologist after him was because he only dealt with Starkey hearing aids, and they still did not have digital aids available for someone with my profound degree of hearing loss, even though it was what I wanted and I badly needed to replace the 6 year old analogs I’d been wearing back then. Oy, if I only knew, I would have bit the bullet and waited just a little while longer.

Now it looks like Starkey not only have digitals now, but even leapfrogged the competition with all these crazy new advancements to their technology. I’m still guarded about how effective the new aids will be, but for the first time in a long time I have hope. Maybe these new aids will finally be able to help me get back a part of my life that I’ve been missing for so long.