Personal Narrative Hearing Loss

Saturday afternoon at about 2:00, I put in earplugs to simulate a bilateral conductive hearing loss. When I initially put them in, I was working on homework in the dining room with my roommate, Ashton, who was on the phone with her mother. Prior to putting in the earplugs, I could hear her mother’s voice through the phone. Once I put the earplugs in, Ashton’s voice became muffled and I could no longer hear her mother’s voice at all. I was also chewing gum at this time and noticed that the sound of my chewing became much more intense. After a while, my other roommate, Jacqueline, came out of her room and began talking to Ashton and me. Generally, Jacqueline’s voice has an above average high amplitude. However, with the earplugs, I perceived

her voice at an average loudness. Ashton’s voice, on the other hand, was much more difficult to hear. I asked if I was speaking loudly and they assured me that I was. Another observation I made while we were talking was the difference in the acoustics of the room. Our dining room tends to reverberate speech, but I did not hear any echoes with the earplugs in. This seemed to make the voices much easier to understand, especially Jacqueline’s. It was not long before Jacqueline left and Ashton and I resumed our studies. I took a drink from my water bottle, which was extremely loud in my head. Ashton soon informed me that I was making racket by hitting my feet against the dining room chair, a sound that I could not hear. I quickly stopped and apologized.
At around 3:30, Ashton and I went to Walmart.

We took Ashton’s motor scooter, which seats two people (she was driving). It is normally difficult to hear anything other than wind and the sound of the scooter, whereas with earplugs it was a significantly less noisy ride. Once we arrived to Walmart, I noted that the usual sound made by footsteps and shopping carts was almost inaudible. As I was inspecting some bananas, there was a family in close proximity with their young toddler in the shopping cart. The child began laughing and producing vocalizations that I could easily perceive. However, I had difficulty hearing the child’s mother when she spoke, while the father’s speech was slightly more audible than hers. One thing that I found strange was that when Ashton would ask me a question, she usually had to have me repeat the answer. In my head, I thought I was talking at an average loudness, but evidently I was speaking at a lower volume than normal. An additional observation made was that I could not hear when other people would say, “Excuse me,” when I was obstructing their path. This made me feel like a nuisance, but luckily most people in Stillwater are patient kindhearted. The most frustrating endeavor at Walmart occurred at checkout. Ashton and I always split the cost of groceries, which ordinarily is not an issue. However, the cashier had never done this before and did not know how to execute the transaction. Her supervisor came to assist her, but I had a hard time

even understanding what was going on. I relied on Ashton to tell me when to swipe my card, and to speak to the cashier. After about ten minutes of the supervisor and Ashton reassuring the cashier that our transaction was successfully performed, Ashton and I left Walmart and returned home.
Ashton and I got back to our house and put away our groceries at about 4:45.

Shortly after, I grabbed my clothes from the dryer and took them upstairs to fold. When I was done folding my laundry, I returned downstairs to resume my homework. I was surprised to see Ashton’s friend on the couch. I did not hear the doorbell, nor could I hear their voices from upstairs. I began to wonder how people with hearing loss know when someone is knocking at their door or ringing their doorbell if they are not in close proximity to their entryway. I figured that they probably have to know in advance that someone will be coming to their house. Out of everyone that I had interacted with thus far in the experiment, Ashton’s friend was the hardest to understand. She has a higher pitched voice and speaks softly. As she was talking to Ashton and me, I finally tuned out because I kept having to ask her to repeat what she had said. It was then that I decided to call my mom. I hypothesized that talking on the phone would be exceptionally challenging because I figured sound would be altered as it travelled through an electronic device. To my surprise, the conversation I had with my mom was the easiest that I had all day. I could even hear my dog from back home barking in the background. I told my mom about my four-hour experience of having a bilateral conductive hearing loss. I then asked her if she could speak in a high pitch voice and then in a low pitch voice without increasing her volume. While

I could understand her speech at both high and low frequencies, her low frequency voice seemed to be more audible. I concluded that the reason I could hear her so well was because the sound was being transmitted from my phone directly to my ear, without travelling through air and losing intensity.
At 6:00 p.m., I finally took the earplugs out. The whole environment around me became noisier, and other people’s speech became crystal clear. I described this feeling to Ashton as, “I feel like I’m not confined in my own head anymore.” In other words, my own speech, chewing, and swallowing sounds returned to normal, as opposed to being unusually loud. In addition, I no longer had to intently focus on what people were saying and observe their lip movements to understand because sounds waves could move through my auditory system unobstructed. Although I got to endure some of the struggles that people with hearing loss face, at the end of the day, my hearing was restored. People with hearing loss, unfortunately, cannot simply remove earplugs to restore their hearing. That being said, this simulation has undoubtedly strengthened my empathy for individuals with hearing loss.