Last Friday, I took a few hours off from work and decided to start the weekend early by taking a drive with John. To begin, we picked up Eva from Kindergarten and drove her to her daycare. That day, Eva had received some early holiday things, one of which was a small bell. She wanted to play with it in the car. Before handing it back to her I shock it and asked John if he could hear it. He could not. I was not surprised but I wanted to be sure before I allowed Eva to start playing with it whilst John was driving.
John has hearing loss from the abuse his ears have endured over the years of him being around guns and explosives. He also has tinnitus. I’m unsure if he has any hearing loss from his TBI. With his TBI, he has an increased sensitivity to background noise that most of us can generally drown out and ignore, but only when those sounds are in a frequency range he can hear.
A learned behavior for me has been to be his ears. High frequency chimes or tinkling bells sound like clicks to him. Some of these include an egg timer, an alarm on a wrist watch, the beeping of the Instapot, or holiday bells. He cannot hear crickets and hasn’t since he was in high school. He sometimes has trouble hearing my voice and often struggles to hear Eva’s voice because of the tendency for female voices to be higher.
Because of all this, I step in and let him know when the timer telling him something he is cooking is going off. He had actually stopped wearing watches because he had too many experiences of people annoyingly asking him to turn his watch alarm off. He literally is unaware of it. I interpret for him sometimes with Eva or when we are out and about and interacting with someone. I repeat myself a lot and try to get his attention and look at him before I say something to him, or raise my voice a smidge if not. I’ve had to close the window on a summer night before because the beautiful sound of crickets are keeping me awake. He’ll ask, “Why are you closing the window?” And then laugh when I vent about the noisy insect neighbors.
At other times I am his ears and interpreter when there’s too much of an echo or too much background noise, such as at a restaurant or at a grocery store check out line. But, that is different.
I know it’s not coming across here as something we laugh about but the bell thing was an instance of that. It’s not a funny, laughing at dad thing but more a making light of a crummy situation thing that we all appreciate.
TBI Spouse (and Others) 