"Your greatest fear is that you will be changed by your hearing loss."

This is what my therapist said to me several weeks ago, shortly after I learned that my sudden hearing loss was likely permanent. I have thought about her words several times since then with different reactions. Most recently, I find myself thinking "Of course it is. EVERYTHING has changed. Every single thing in my life has changed and is affected by my hearing loss! Nothing is the same. Everything is different."

Every day, when I wake up, I now lay in bed for a bit longer. As soon as I sit up in the bed, the pressure in my right ear hits. When I go to sleep and lay in the bed, I now do so on my side with my right ear on the pillow. If my right ear is facing towards the ceiling, I can't hear very well. I have frequent headaches and must often make decisions between suffering through the headaches and taking meds. If the headache is bad, I have trouble concentrating but if I take enough meds to address the headache, they make me sleepy. Social events are now affected. Friends who know about now ask "Where can we go that will be good for you?" While I appreciate their kindness, it is another reminder of how my life has changed. When I walk down the hall with people, it is hard to have conversations with them as we walk. A student recently asked me how my summer was. My response to her was delayed as it took me a few seconds to figure out that 1) she'd asked me a question and 2) what the question was. I am teaching everything online, something I never expected to do, especially given my love of being in the classroom. When I type and write, I make mistakes I never used to make. I confuse words like there and their in writing; I type "it" instead of "is". I am quieter and crave quiet. I have to manage my energy differently: if I have an evening event, I may adjust my schedule so I have less going on in the morning so I have enough energy left at night for the event. Family interactions are different. I don't enjoy talking on the phone so I limit my conversations to ~15 minutes or so. When there are a lot of family members around and the noise gets too loud, I begin cleaning up so I can still be a part of the interaction but not disappear entirely. I don't want to tell everyone else to be quiet; it's my problem, not their's and I don't want to be "that person" who telling everyone to quiet down. I love my dogs but the sound of one their barks drives me up the wall in ways it never used to. Tennis is different. I will probably ask my opponents to use hand signals when they make the call so I know if the ball is in or out. I have wanted to blog for years but never knew what to write about and yet here I am, blogging about sudden hearing loss. I lost my hearing but I have lost so much more than that. There are so many secondary losses to sudden hearing loss and while I have much to be grateful for, today I am sitting in the sadness and the grief associated with losing my hearing and so much more.