Daily Dose of English 181
Being Half Deaf
Daily Dose of English 181
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benzlanguagelive.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about being half deaf. Although give me a quick second, I want to... I wanted to write down an idea. I think I spelled it right, yeah. I keep my ideas for this podcast in a document. And just as I started, I had an idea that I didn't want to forget. So I put it down and we can get back to the actual episode. Oh, no. All right. I skipped one. So never mind. We're talking about being half deaf today. I have to change that because I have it wrong in my doc now because I skipped one. Okay, fix there, and then being half deaf. All right, we're fine. A problem fully solved, it is perfect and great. Anyways, hi everybody, how are you? Starting a little bit chaotic today, but you know what, that's how we roll. Real English, real talk. All right, so the episode title might not be very clear. You might understand the words and know them, but like, what do they have to do together? So if you don't know, deaf is when you can't hear. So somebody who is deaf cannot hear with their ears. Like their ears do not work in some way. either fully so they can't hear anything or they are partially deaf, which is actually more common. Most deaf people have like a small amount of hearing, like a couple percent or whatever, like they can hear if it's very, very close or very, very loud. And so that's especially like when you start to lose your hearing at an older age. basically louder noises still work, which is why people have like hearing aids, which essentially just amplify the sound and make it louder so that you can actually hear what's going on around you, and you turn them up or turn them down depending on where you are. And then half-death is in my case where I am half-death. I'm not fully-death, I can still hear, but I have half of my hearing. But I have it in a weird way. A lot of people think about half deaf. They think about like 50% hearing in both ears or something like that. So where both ears are not very good, but they do function. I have a sort of a strange deafness where I am 100% fully, completely deaf in my right ear. and totally normal in my left ear. Just completely normal. My hearing, when I was last measured, when I was pretty young, like probably a decade or even 12 years ago, was the last time that I had my hearing measured. It was better than like most people. It was like in the top 25% of hearing. It's just that my other ear just completely doesn't work. which is the weird thing. So it's like, it's a very strange scenario because I didn't have like an accident or anything. I was sort of just born like this. I did have hearing when I was young and I lost it, which we'll talk about in a second. But like the doctor that I would go see when I was young, cause I've always had ear problems, obviously, it's like, Yeah, we don't really know why exactly he has this. He just does. And it's also really not common. I know a couple of other people that have something similar, but that's it. And like all of his years of experience, he's only come across a couple of people with like a similar thing. It's a very just strange anomaly that I have. Specifically, there's a part inside your ear called your cochlear or cochlea, depending on your pronunciation. I think it's actually pronounced cochlear, but it's such a rare word that doesn't have a super clear pronunciation that you can hear it several ways. But your cochlear, like in your ear, is sort of what does the hearing part. And the rest of my ear works fine. It's just that part that just doesn't. There's actually like basically little tiny hairs that vibrate with the vibrations from the air and mine just don't work. And so that's what sort of causes my hearing to be zero and not just like bad, right? I don't necessarily have a problem with my inner ear or with like other parts of my ear. It is just that, that one part is just completely shut off. I think an okay way is like, if you have a computer that's just unplugged from the wall, like all the parts function, it just isn't getting power. There's no signal to it to like actually work. And it's just odd because I don't actually have ear problems or any of balance problems, for example. So a lot of people who have hearing problems also have balance problems or other problems that come from your inner ear. I've just never had any of that. My balance has always been totally normal. Now I don't have any special like ear problems at this point in my life. I do actually have something that is probably related, which is tinnitus. in my left ear. So tinnitus is basically a constant ringing or a sound in your ears, or a ear in my case. And thankfully, mine is not very bad. It's very light. But if I ever don't have any audio in my ear, I can hear a slight ringing sound. Honestly, it's not that bad. People with like tonight is from from hearing loss or like hearing damage, it can be really, really loud and very obnoxious. So It's a very different kind of tinnitus. It is just technically still the same thing, just a very, very light form of it, which is very good, because I don't want to have bad tinnitus, because that would be terrible. And I used to have, so before I lost my hearing when I was, because I lost it when I was about eight years old, I was in, I think like second grade. No, what are you doing eight years old? I don't know. Well, I was in school and I remember, and I would get a lot of ear infections. That was a very common thing for me to have when I was a kid, even a baby. I would have ear infections all the time. My ears were just messed up. And I got several different procedures done because they were really, really painful. I don't really remember the pain specifically, but I remember not being able to sleep, not being able to focus, just being in horrible pain whenever I had an ear infection, which was every couple months, right? I probably got five or six per year. And then I had those pretty much up until I was eight. And then I had a really bad ear infection. I lost all of my hearing pretty much for a few days where just it was so bad. There was so much buildup of pressure and stuff in my ears that it was just, it was terrible. I couldn't hear. It was in a lot of pain. And then It started to go down, dive, die away. And my hearing in my right ear just never came back. It was completely gone. Never, you couldn't hear anything. And my left ear was came back normally, right? It was just a bad ear infection. It came back. And then pretty much since then I haven't had any ear problems. I have had a couple of times where I got ear infections or an ear infection, um, which was kind of scary. Cause I was worried that I was going to, it was going to happen in my other ear as well. but it was just like an ear infection that I got, I think twice only, or maybe it was at once. I don't remember if it was once or twice, but it was not very many times in all of those years since then. So hopefully it was just my right ear just fucking with things to make my whole ear system bad. because your ear, nose, and throat are very connected. I don't know if you've ever had, if you've ever had problems with any of those, you might have gone to see a specialist in all three, right? So in the US, they're called ENTs. So ear, nose, and throat doctors. And so I'd go see an ENT pretty often because I had those problems. And then now they're really, gone. I can't hear, but it's also not the worst thing in the world because I can hear in my other ear. The things that I lose out on are dual audio, directional hearing, and like people may assume that you can hear, right? It's normal to hear, and since I am a hearing person, it doesn't look like, I don't seem deaf, right? And so it can cause some like misunderstandings there. So that first thing I said, which was, what was it? Whatever, I'll start with directional hearing. I don't know what order I said them in, but directional hearing is when you can close your eyes or just like, and hear a sound and be able to like point to it, right? So if you, if you spin around in a circle and you close your eyes and your friend like claps or it says a noise or something in the room, you can probably point to them, right? You can hear where they are using your two ears and your brain can figure out more or less where something is coming from, right? So that's directional hearing. I don't have that. I only have one ear. So this happens with people with one ear or one good eye or anything like that where we actually use our brains use two slightly different signals to figure out where something is coming from or for how far away something is. So depth perception, my mom has a different vision in her two eyes. And so her depth perception isn't great. It's still functional, but if you only had one eye, your depth of reception is way worse. That's how far away something is. Just because your eye, your brain uses slightly different signals to figure it out. Same thing with hearing. So I can't point to you unless you're basically directly to my left. I have a slight range of being able to detect where something is on my left, but my directional hearing in general is just bad. I just can't do anything with that. The other thing is... Alright, I forgot. Shoot, oh, like dual audio. So on computers or any digital audio signal, there's usually a left and right output. So whenever you record something, there is left and right output. I don't know how to explain this. Stereo audio, that's the term for it, okay. Stereo audio, I can't hear. So, a lot of songs, for example, will actually play with stereo audio. The song that comes to mind is Bohemian Rhapsody, where there are different parts that play in the right ear and the left ear or the right speaker and the left speaker. I cannot hear the right side. And so I have never been able to hear like stereo music or stereo, whatever really, which is actually a little bit annoying. It's quite annoying. It's probably the worst part of all this. It's very obnoxious because on a lot of programs, it is like Spotify, for example, you can't turn on mono audio, which is having everything be the same. Because you have to go into the device settings and things and it doesn't always work because it's a fairly niche thing. A lot of people like having the stereo audio because it's nice. It adds depth and things. But for those of us who cannot hear stereo audio, it's a big pain. Actually, relatively recently, my headphones broke. and I had, or my left headphone broke, so I had to use my right headphone for my left ear. And I was recording this podcast and I learned that the intro and outro music have sound different on the two ears. I didn't know that. I was, whenever I played the audio, I would just listen to the music and it would sound normal to me. And then I started listening to the other one, I'm like, oh, that's different. So there's a difference in the music that I didn't know existed. Um, I also had an issue where I used to record in stereo audio, but I have a mono audio microphone and it was only putting the audio into the left signal. Um, and I thought that was fine. Cause whenever I listened to the videos, it sounded good, but somebody, uh, comments at one point and he's like, okay, you can't hear anything in this video. It's completely silent. And I go, what do you mean it's silent? I listened to it. It's not silent. Turns out that person, only their right speaker was working, so they heard nothing, but only my left speaker, my left ear worked, so I heard everything. And so there can be these weird audio issues that come up when you don't really realize, or you can't really hear in stereo, which is a pain. I really wish that I could just like force my entire computer, entire phone to be on only mono audio, but I haven't figured out how. There's even a thread. I actually searched this a while ago. There's this like four year old thread on Spotify's community forums. of like hundreds of people begging for them to make mono audio like a thing that you can just set on your profile because you can't and it's so annoying and I really really wish that you could because there are there's a lot of people like us out there that can only hear in one ear or just want mono audio um and it's not the difficult thing to do in software so yeah and then the final thing I want to mention is that uh People will expect you to be able to hear out of your both ears because that's what most people can do. And so very frequently people will be on my right side talking to me and I just can't hear anything. I just won't be able to hear what they're saying or I don't even know they're talking to me. And that can be pretty frustrating because I can tell that they're talking but I don't know what they're saying or they're trying to get my attention and I just don't know. Some people have gotten frustrated with me because they're like, why aren't you listening to me? And I go, I don't know you're talking. I didn't had no idea. Um, and actually that becomes a problem as well in, in noisy environments. I already don't love noisy places just in general, but then add in the fact that it makes, it's a lot harder to isolate people speaking if you don't have two ears, right? That goes back to the directional hearing thing is where all of the, um, stimulus in, of sound is going into my one receptor. And so somebody who's sitting in front of me, I have a lot harder time focusing on their talking in a loud environment, which adds to the difficulty of being in a bar, for example. I really don't like big bars or noisy places. because it's just so hard to hear and focus. Several times I've gone out with people and I will basically just be sitting there enjoying my drink and just like looking around because I can't really be a part of the conversation unless somebody leans very close to me and speaks very loudly because I just can't pick up what people are saying from across the table and it's just, yeah, it's not that much fun. However, I've gotten used to it at this point. I don't really want or need my hearing back in my right ear because I've lived with it for so long that it's just a part of my life. I don't think about it at all. I can block out sounds easily. People who live with me or know me well get used to the fact that I can only hear in one ear. And so there's a bunch of things that Like, I figure it out and I have no need to fix them, right? It's not really a problem anymore, it's just different. And like, for example, I don't really want to be able to hear out of both ears when I'm sleeping. I can sleep when there's noise because I just put my good ear against the pillow and, okay, goodbye noise, easy peasy. But a lot of people get woken up by noise because they can hear it with their exposed ear. Um, so yeah, anyways, this episode is very long because I'm just key. I think, I think these episodes are getting longer, um, on average, but I guess that's fine. Hopefully you don't mind, but, um, it's kind of, uh, making the, um, short, simple podcast thing a little bit, not as true. Anyways, I hope that you enjoyed. I thank you very much for listening and I hope that you learned something new maybe. If you have something interesting and unique about your body or your hearing, I'd be curious to know down in the comments below. See you tomorrow. Bye.
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