Dear Lit Loves,
As promised I read Shouting Won't Help by Katherine Bouton as my next narrative nonfiction choice. I chose this book because Ms. Bouton relates her experiences as a person who has, like me, suffered sensorineural hearing loss. Please understand that when I read a book like this I am reading it from the standpoint of a patient that was diagnosed with Meniere's disease at age eighteen. Ms. Bouton worked at The New Yorker as a journalist when she first realized she had hearing loss that was putting her job in jeopardy. She goes on to relate to the reader, in an oftentimes highly technical manner, how she came to recognize and accept she was profoundly deaf in her left ear and headed that way in her right ear as well. I mean, when you have problems hearing people over the phone and have to ask them to write you a memo or send a summary email about that which you discussed on the phone, you have some serious issues. Like the vast majority of people, Ms. Bouton lived in denial for a long time about how badly she needed to get help for her hearing loss. There are several chapters where she discusses the stigma associated with hearing loss being age-related as well as hearing loss being an invisible disability. This proved interesting to me because I never really lived in denial about my own hearing issues; when you have vertigo in which you spend eight or nine hours on the floor regurgitating and it's due to fluid buildup in your inner ear, you tend to seek help immediately. I viewed my vertigo and hearing loss as an emergency. Maybe it was because I was so young in comparison to when Ms. Bouton began to lose her hearing in her thirties and forties.
Ms. Bouton never truly gets an answer for what caused her sensorineural hearing loss. Sensorineural hearing loss is when the hearing loss results from aging or noise exposure and it's particularly when the hair cells in the inner ear are damaged. Worse, you can also suffer hearing loss due to damage to the auditory nerve which is responsible for carrying sound to the brain. The other type of hearing loss is conductive and it mostly occurs in children. Conductive hearing loss is when ear wax impedes sound and causes hearing loss or you have a structural anomaly within the ear causing hearing loss. In Ms. Bouton's case, she eventually believes her hearing loss was due to a trip she took to Turkey to help in an excavation process. She became profoundly sick during this trip and believes a parasite or virus is what eventually caused her loss of hearing. She was tested for Meniere's disease by doctors, but I could tell by the way she glossed over the ENG test used to diagnose Meniere's that there was no way she could have this disease. An ENG for me, an actual Meniere's patient, is more like getting a root canal and then being hit by a semi. It ain't fun and no, I do not indulge my doctors in the results for an ENG except every ten years. Ms. Bouton's vertigo experiences were extremely mild as well and held no comparison to those I suffer. She did opt for hearing aids and a cochlear implant to help improve her hearing. The hearing aid proved difficult for her because getting the correct fit seems near impossible. The cochlear implant proved somewhat beneficial for Ms. Bouton. When you get a cochlear implant your neurosurgeon goes into the inner ear via the skull. He drills a tunnel from the mastoid bone toward the cochlea in the inner ear. The neurosurgeon then places the electrode into the cochlea and reseals the area with body tissue. Because inevitably some of the inner ear fluid inside the cochlea can leak out, a person will experience balance problems after surgery until the site heals and the fluid equalizes. (This was a very technical part of the book so I'm doing my best to keep it as simple as possible; however, even I got confused while reading about this). Now, here's the real kicker of cochlear implant surgery: the device can't be activated until a month after surgery. Once the implant is activated a patient can expect to spend many an appointment with an audiologist trying to adjust the software within so the person actually can recognize incoming sound as words. Honestly, the difficulties this caused Ms. Bouton and the highly frequent visits she had to make with her audiologist made me think it would have been better to lip-read or pick up sign language because that's how frustrating I found her experience coping with a cochlear implant to be.
Now, the author does discuss all sorts of other technology that can be used along with cochlear implants and hearing aids to assist people in hearing from cell phones, in theaters, etc., but honestly I have to say, it all sounded like Greek to me without any sort of diagrams or pictures of the actual technology to help illustrate this kind of advanced technology. Ms. Bouton does a good job describing what it feels like to have Tinnitus or ringing/buzzing/ humming in the ear. It can be annoying and I've learned to ignore my own bouts with tinnitus or at least not have a panic attack when it sounds like an ambulance siren going off inside my left ear. I was given Antivert for bouts with tinnitus which basically soothes the nerve endings inside the inner ear which alleviates my tinnitus. On a daily basis I use a variety of drugs for my Meniere's disease including a diuretic, anti-anxiety medication, and an anti-depressant. For bouts with extreme vertigo, I utilize Valium which has greatly shorten the length and severity of my attacks.
Ms. Bouton touches on some advancements in the pipeline for persons with senorineural hearing loss especially the regeneration of inner ear hair cells. This is still in the pipeline though. The military is actually working on a pill to assist with improving hearing loss as well as helping to prevent hearing loss in the first place. I found this part of the book most interesting as this is cutting edge to me. I'm not sure how realistic it is to regenerate inner ear hair cells. Maybe it can be accomplished with stem cells, but I still think it will be a long while before we see that capability. I think it's more feasible to find a pharmaceutical agent that eventually helps those of us with severe hearing loss. Do we need to use earplugs and turn down the volume on the ipod? Definitely. Will teenagers do this? I seriously doubt it. I listen to Aerosmith sometimes at loud volumes and I have Meniere's disease. Sometimes I just want to rock out while driving my Mustang. Admittedly, I do this a lot less these days, but teenagers feel and think they're invincible so let's all be realistic.
All in all, I was satisfied with this memoir about hearing loss, but I wasn't jumping up and down about it and recommending it to all the members of my Meniere's disease support group. I think this book frequently was way too technical. And I kept wondering why Ms. Bouton, after spending so much money on hearing aids, implants, and other tech devices, didn't go ahead and begin auditory and speech therapy long before she did. Yes, it's frustrating having hearing loss that cannot be reversed and for which there is no cure. I will say that Histamine injections once a week have certainly helped me which was a treatment Ms. Bouton did not discuss in the book. I think there definitely needs to be a book about sensorineural hearing loss due to other causes, and I think another book needs to tackle the issue in a simpler, more personable fashion.
Till next time,
Grace
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