Give Me a Sign(2)

“Hot dog!” Whoops, sort of yelled that one. I need to settle into a happy medium.

The chair scratches my thighs as I shift to relax my shoulders and stare ahead. But my audiologist is holding an envelope over her mouth so I can’t read her lips. She keeps gradually lowering the volume now, so it’s projected at a level that isn’t necessarily comfortable or effortless to hear. “Say the word ‘ice cream.’？”

“Ice cream.” I’m still confident enough in the words to repeat them.

But it gets more difficult. Ms. Shelly increases the background noise, and I almost can’t tell if she’s still speaking. She’s being drowned out by the roar. From the familiarity, I recognize, “Say the word ——。” Yet I can’t make out the rest.

I scrunch my nose and tilt my head to the side. Definitely didn’t catch this one. It was . . . no. I’m supposed to give my best guess, but I can’t even think of a word similar to what I heard. A hint of frustration rises within me.

It’s my hearing being graded, not me.

This is the point in a typical conversation where I’d proclaim my most often used word—“what?”—as many times as it’d take for a person to get their message across. It’s best when someone can switch up their wording to help me along. The greater the context, the more likely I am to pick up on what I’m missing.

However, right now, there is no context. Only background noise and an elusive word. At least this is better than the frequency test. I swear by the end of that one I’m imagining beeps that don’t exist.

I give up and shrug. What’s another failed test at this rate?

Ms. Shelly continues. Another twenty or so words later, she finally puts down the envelope and gives me a smile while shutting off the background noise and returning her voice volume to full blast. “Great job, Lilah. We’ll move on now.”

She enters my side of the booth, her laminated ID badge dangling from her neck, and sticks various diagnostic tools in my ears and on my head. Throughout several rounds of different examinations, I suppress the urge to compare this to an alien abduction.

When it’s all over, Ms. Shelly returns and leads us out of the soundbooth and over to her office, where I usually get fitted for new earmolds and have my hearing aid levels adjusted. We take a seat around a small side table. My mom pulls her chair forward so they can crowd together over my results. I sit back, a little anxious, though there hasn’t been any reason to be yet. My hearing loss, which I’ve had since birth, isn’t supposed to be degenerative.

My mom frowns at the printout. I scramble to push in my hearing aids, looping the backs over and behind my ears. Wearing them helps, but they’re never going to be a perfect fix. What people don’t understand is that when I’m wearing my hearing aids, there’s still a lot that I miss. And without them, there’s still a lot I could catch by relying on lipreading and deductive reasoning.

We peer at the audiogram as my audiologist points to the zigzag lines trailing downward along the bottom half of the graph. The results for my left and right ears are close together, a fairly even loss across both sides.

“So we have a small dip since last time,” Ms. Shelly explains seriously, but then she smiles. “I wouldn’t be too worried about it.”

“All the more reason for her to use her accommodations for school,” my mom says.

“There is a newer FM she might prefer.” Ms. Shelly reaches back to her desk to get a pamphlet for my mom, bypassing other ones that showcase different hearing aid brands or earmold color options. “Look how cool! It’s sleek and modern.”

But I don’t care. While they discuss the pros, cons, and cost of a newer model, bemoaning the lack of insurance coverage, I stare back at the audiogram. I’ve always wondered what an additional loss would feel like. I’m not upset about it. If anything, I’m annoyed it’s not more significant.

To hearies, that may seem weird. I can’t really express why I feel this way, other than it might be nice to not stay caught in between. Like, if I had to choose between being fully hearing or fully deaf, I’m not certain my decision would be obvious.

And maybe, if the loss were profound, my family would be forced to finally take learning American Sign Language seriously. I’d seem “deaf enough” that my classmates would truly understand my need for all those school accommodations, rather than silently judge and question me. Because right now, they know I’m not hearing, but I don’t fit their expectations of deafness, either.

It’s a strange realm, here in the middle.

Since I’m overdue for a new set of hearing aids, Ms. Shelley gets out the supplies to create earmold impressions. I sit still as she squeezes cold pink goo into each ear. In a few weeks, I’ll come get the molds and processors when they are ready and assembled. It will take wearing them awhile for my brain to adjust to the latest technology and for the world around me to sound like I’m used to.

I’m not ashamed of my disability or anything like that. What bothers me is trying to fit into the hearing world. That I’m constantly the odd one out, the one who always has to explain or adjust.

I can think of one place where I didn’t feel this way: Gray Wolf, a summer camp for the deaf and blind. I stopped going after eighth grade, since leaving for an entire summer didn’t really fit into my plans once high school began. But it was a unique place where I didn’t have to explain my hearing loss to anyone. And it was my introduction to sign language and Deaf culture.