Someday soon I am going to have to address an elephant in my room. The lines, marks and ravages of age are all over me and I know that if I don’t die soon things are only going to get worse. My laser-boosted eyesight, with added glasses for just about everything, is holding out reasonably well and although I ache and creak much more than I used to, I am relatively mobile. But my latest elephant is the slow and steady deterioration of my hearing. Now, it’s not catastrophic yet, but I am aware I do tend to miss words and sometimes whole sentences. This is partly down to the tinnitus I have picked up at far too many rock gigs. That’s with me 24/7 and the dead of night is now accompanied by a steady hiss, a roar, a static sound or just pure out and out ringing. On it’s own, the tinnitus was bearable and manageable but I know there’s something else going on.
These days, I have to sit nearer to the television to catch everything that’s going on. It itself that might not be too bad, but my ADHD means that I have always found it hard to follow the storylines in anything except the most simple of programmes. Even a Bond film sees me asking my long-suffering partner what’s going on in the storyline and forgetting which character is which. We are currently ploughing through over 230 episodes of Silent Witness, the show having somehow past me by since its inception, and it’s absolutely great, even if I can’t always follow what’s going on. The only thing I don’t forget is how much I love Emilia Fox.
At the moment, I can just about cope with my current levels of hearing but the day – somewhere in the middle distance, I hope – is coming where I may require hearing aids. Given my rapidly advancing age, they will not exactly worsen anything that remains of any good looks I may once have had (that’s a way of saying hearing aids won’t make me any less repulsive to look at) but since I have reluctantly started to recognise the inevitable. Most hearing aids – well, you can see them, just like you can see glasses. Not those grotesque things with wires leading to a contraption in your top pocket, but even those things which hook on behind your ears put the fear of god in me.
A friend decided to shell out a small fortune on ‘in ear’ hearing aids and I never realised until he told me. Since then, I spend far too much time staring into his ears, but in all honesty that could be the solution which suits my vanity. At least I’d be able to hear stuff better, even if I am still struggling to work out what the hell is going on.
Old age, eh? What else could possibly go wrong? Well, not much today given I have been struck down with a gout episode which is by far the most painful condition known to man kind. At least it takes my mind of the state of my ears.
Getting old brings many unwanted ‘friends’. The only positive is that it beats the alternative.
