Chapter 2

FEBRUARY

A Bedazzled Hearing Aid

I called Dr. Godin’s office fully expecting to get the runaround, but, surprisingly, they got me in right away. I arrived at the spacious office waiting room and filled out the paperwork. I’m not sure why the way they process medical forms hasn’t changed since the era of Bob Cratchit. We live in an age where a robot can vacuum our floors, but we still get a clipboard and a pen to fill out forms in the doctor’s office? I have a theory that the paperwork at doctors’ offices is total busywork to distract you from the fact that after rushing to get to your appointment on time, you are forced to wait forty-five minutes before you can see the doctor. There are like ten pages of redundant questions and fill-in-the-blanks on a clipboard, including name and medical history, even though they literally have your name in the system from when you made the appointment and the referring physician already sent your medical history. They call your name to hand you a paper that asks for your name. Do a lot of people change their names and/or birth dates since the last time they were in a doctor’s office?

If all these forms are eventually being entered into a computer, why are you filling them out again? Can’t they just email the forms from the referring doctor’s office? Are you waiting so long in doctors’ offices so they can retype the same information over and over again?

Then you sign that you have acknowledged your rights as a patient, but you never read the rights because you are too exhausted from filling out the ten pages of forms. The best is the page where you release the rights to share your data with other doctors. You sign the page, but they never share the data, or else we would not be filling out ten pages of forms! And you’re not done yet! Next, they have you copy down the tiny numbers on your insurance card even though they are going to make a copy of it. You know those stacks of magazines on the side tables in doctors’ offices? No one is ever reading them because they are too busy filling out forms. Maybe the publishers of the magazines should solve the form problem—it would be in their best interest.

Finally, my name is called. I say, “Hold on, I only have three more pages of questions to answer.”

“That’s okay,” they say. “You don’t have to fill the rest out.” I knew it! Busywork. Theory proved.

Before I see the doctor, I go into a tiny booth with a technician to take a hearing test. It’s like a recording booth where I put on giant headphones. The technician’s on the other side of a window with some contraption that plays sounds while she measures my response. The purpose of the test is to see if I can hear a variety of different tones at different frequencies. When I hear a tone, I raise my hand. First, the “good ear.” I hear the variety of tones, and I raise my hand after each one. Easy. Now, the “bad” ear. Here’s where I discover that I’m determined to beat the test, even if I can’t hear the tones. Something in me wants to “pass,” even though I should be focused on getting my hearing problem diagnosed.

I hear nothing. Or do I? Was that a tone or just ringing in my ears? I raise my hand. After that, there is a pause, where a tone should probably be. I might have heard something. I tentatively raise my hand. Was there no tone? Are they trying to trick me? Did I just raise my hand after no tone and now look stupid? Like I’m cheating? But wait, in the other ear, there was always a tone. Do I need a hearing aid? That might be the end game here. Maybe I’ll just get a hearing aid. I mean, hearing aids are so small and discreet now, no one would ever really see it. It would be kind of cool. I could turn it up and hear people whispering from across a room (hushed): “Is Jeannie Gaffigan wearing a hearing aid?” “I HEARD THAT!” Or else I could get a huge hearing aid and wear it proudly. Maybe it would look like the Bluetooth earbud my dad always wears, with the strap around the ear. He loves that thing. I think it makes him feel like he is in the Secret Service or something. I could get a hot pink one, or bedazzle one with rhinestone stickers, and my seven-year-old would then steal it and wear it to school. Maybe I would start a trend: “What do you mean, you don’t have a hearing aid? All the cool kids have them!” I continued to raise my hand at the phantom tones until the technician said, “Okay, you are all done. I’m going to take you to the exam room where the doctor will see you.”

The good thing about going to an ENT specialist is that you don’t have to take off your clothes and put on the paper gown. There is rarely anything to take off that covers the ears, nose, and throat. Even if you have on a hat and a ski mask, if you take them off, you don’t need to put on a paper hat or ski mask that is all open in the back. At this point I realize that the taking off of the clothes and changing into the paper robe is a welcome distraction from the fact that you are now waiting in a different room.

Mental note for future set design: Just change the poster of the specific “inside of the body” chart on the wall, and the model of the body part on the counter, for different doctor’s office sets. That would save a ton of money for the scenic department.

Did the doctor forget about me? Have I been in this appointment all day? I have a job. What the hell are they pulling here? Should I look through the drawers? Are they watching me in here? Do doctors use a patient cam? Anyway, I have things to do. Finally, enter a man in his twenties. I’m impressed that the doctor is so young, until I realize that it’s the doctor’s assistant, Kurt, who apologizes for keeping me waiting. “That’s fine,” I lie. “At least you’re here now.”

He then looks at the computer and asks my name and my birthday. Okay, I think. I get it. They obviously should make sure they have the right person. It’s a safety issue so they don’t remove my gallbladder when I am just here for a bedazzled hearing aid. But then he proceeds to ask me a series of questions that I already filled out on the ten pages of forms! I try to be calm as I answer: “Yes, that is correct, as I previously stated on the ten pages of forms I filled out in the waiting room!” He obviously thinks I’m just another crazy impatient patient. Or some weirdo who would use a term like “impatient patient.”

“Okay,” he says. “The doctor is seeing someone else now, and he will be in shortly.” I’ve heard that one before. He exits and I go to my phone to catch up on emails. I don’t know what anyone did in a waiting room before smartphones. I guess they embraced their human emotions. Even the times when I am wearing the paper robe, I go straight to my pile of clothes on the chair and dig out my phone. What if I miss something? I view the ability to catch up on emails all day the same way I view laundry. Don’t let it or them pile up.

I grew up submerged in the opposite philosophy. I was the eldest of nine children. No, that’s not a typo. Nine children. There was a total of eleven people in one house. When I was really young, like elementary school, we would have a dreadful ritual once a week known as “Laundry Day,” where we would head down to the laundry room and confront a literal mountain of dirty clothes that would be daunting even to the Sherpas of Nepal. The mountain was at the foot of “the chute,” a large vent that ran along the inside of the walls down three stories of our house. And it was not always laundry that went down there. Our laundry chute, aside from providing hours of entertainment for a group of unsupervised, rambunctious children (“let’s throw water balloons down the chute!”), also served as a sort of pneumatic tube delivery system for those of us who were too lazy to carry items down three flights of stairs. So the laundry sorting process was also a kind of mining expedition to locate nonlaundry items such as pens, homework, toys, and the occasional dirty diaper, all of which, if accidentally scooped up and put in the washer, could add hours onto the already brutal laundry sweatshop.

The next eight hours would be spent sorting, mining, washing, sorting again, and folding. There were no organized shifts, but the four oldest of us would work as a team, normally to “earn things” like free time in the neighborhood, which would be individually promised to us by Mom. Occasionally someone would do the “slip-away,” and then we’d all start complaining loudly until our mom would track them down. The “putting away” phase was sometimes reserved for another eight-hour day. Even with the two-day process, there was an entire basket or two of socks to sort. There were seemingly hundreds of mismatched socks that almost looked identical, but never really lined up with one another. They would be the same size, but one would be a tube and the other shaped like a foot. Or they would be the same type, but one would be huge and the other tiny. Or they would be identical, but one was bright white and the other dingy gray. The Rubik’s cube was easier to solve. I was so traumatized by “Laundry Day” that I vowed when I had my own household (and I had no idea at the time that there would be seven of us) I would do small loads all day and never have anything close to a mountain, or even a tiny hill. I kept that vow—I run my dang machine all day. Don’t tell Al Gore. I transferred this same concept to my email behavior. Deal with it throughout the day. Never have a mountain of email.

I took the opportunity to catch up on those emails while waiting to be seen by the ENT doctor. It only took me fifteen minutes. I didn’t even “keep as new” the long and complicated ones. I dealt with them. I was done. Still no doctor. I started to feel like I didn’t even care about not being able to hear in my left ear. As a matter of fact, I was angry at myself for wasting half the day on this stupid doctor’s appointment. I was angry at everyone. Except Dr. Hops. I just couldn’t bring myself to be mad at her. I lay back on the exam table and sighed loudly. I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. “Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.” I must have dozed off because I remember being startled awake by the doctor knocking on the door before he entered in a cascade of apologies. Someone had had an emergency. Now I felt guilty. I wiped the trickle of drool off my cheek and smiled my best “no problem” smile.

The doctor went over the results of my hearing test. “Your hearing is within the normal range in both ears,” he said.

“But it’s not!” I exclaimed. “I can barely hear out of my left ear!” So not only did I waste my whole day, but now they’re telling me I don’t even qualify for a hearing aid?

“The hearing in your left ear is slightly less than the hearing in your right, but it’s within the normal range.”

After a pause, I blurted out, “I cheated on the hearing test!”

He seemed perplexed. “I don’t understand…”

I continued my confession. “I raised my hand when I heard nothing, but I kind of heard something, like a tone. But it sounded like it was more in my head. Like more of a ringing. But I guess I shouldn’t have raised my hand.” He looked at me like I didn’t need an ENT, I needed a PsyD. He explained that they were also measuring other things like vibrations and such that I really couldn’t “cheat” on.

He gave me an assignment. Use Flonase three times a day and start a listening enhancement program online, which is like a workout for lazy ears. Okay, I’ll just add that into my free time.

I’m a rule follower. When I got home, I pushed aside the huge pile of work on my desk and immediately googled the online sign-up for the auditory exercises. I committed myself to completing one exercise a day. It was $99 to sign up, but probably less than a hearing aid.

The exercises instructed me to “listen to the male voice” and then played the sounds of a ton of people speaking in a crowded room and then I zeroed in on the male voice. This is misogynistic, I thought. Then, after a minute, the next screen asked me to write or gave me choices to guess what the male voice said. I was pretty good at the exercises, but there was no way to really block my good ear. Still, I religiously followed doctor’s orders: selective hearing exercises and snorting Flonase like an ’80s coke fiend for a month. The left-side hearing didn’t return, but at least I got a new addiction out of it. Always looking for that kick of the first hit.