Like so many other harried women, Kate tended to push herself and her needs to the end of the list. As any woman knows, the list becomes endless and prioritizing is required. Still, too often she falls at the end of the priority list.

When Kate noticed she was having a little trouble hearing when people spoke to her, she denied there was a problem. They just didn’t speak loud enough to be heard or there was too much noise in the crowded area or she must need wax removed from her ears. She didn’t have time to go to the ear doctor. It would have to wait for “someday.”

But when her grandson spoke to her and she repeatedly had to say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear what you said…What? Wait, let me look at you so I can hear you,” and she would read his lips, she knew she was missing things. If she wasn’t hearing him, she wasn’t hearing other people. Had the hearing deficits contributed to her withdrawing from other people because of the embarrassment of not being able to hear what was spoken to her?

Kate’s mother had been deaf for a number of years, beginning when she was a teenager. Her family had insisted she had selective hearing…hearing only what she wanted to hear. By the time Kate and her siblings were born, Mom couldn’t hear her babies cry. She felt them cry. She didn’t hear the knocks at the door or the footfalls on the porch. She felt the vibrations that those things made.

Kate was filled with dread. Deaf. She was going deaf.

She scheduled an appointment with her mother’s doctor. Dr. Lippy had come through with a surgical procedure in the 1960s that restored her mother’s hearing loss caused by otosclerosis. On the one hand, Kate hoped her own diagnosis was otosclerosis so the surgery would help her. On the other hand she was terrified that it would require surgery, for which she would have to be awake during the procedure.

She went through the battery of tests. Dr. Lippy made the diagnosis. Surgery was not an option for otosclerosis of the inner ear, where her loss was occurring. A particular dietary supplement was recommended, and Dr. Lippy advised that hearing aids for both ears would be beneficial to her.

Kate’s daughter, a college student, learned that American Sign Language can now be used to meet the foreign language requirements of a college degree. Kate is working with her daughter to learn ASL so she will never be isolated from other people when she can no longer hear the words they speak should she ever become profoundly deaf.

The hearing aids will help only if she finds the time to schedule to get them. The dietary supplement will help only if she takes it.

There is a whole world of sound to be heard “out there” that no one should miss. Do you have a hearing loss? What are you waiting for?