Hai

Coruscant concept art

I'm 25 and without subtitles I needed to crack the TV a good 5 notches higher to understand what they were saying. I struggled to hear people in cars, on buses, on trains, and yeah in restaurants and cafes

I eventually decided ehhhh it's probably part of my ADHD, I hear things fine but I just suck at processing them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Then this year I decided to do an online hearing test. The results were...... not ideal. I made my friend do the same one because *clearly* there was something wrong with the test, not me. Their result came back fine

So I dragged my 25 year old ass in for a hearing assessment and yeah. Turns out I can't hear any frequencies at all under 50 decibels. My audiogram is a flat line. They said hearing loss this bad isnt gradual, I must've been born with it and it was never picked up on

The first few times I went outside with my hearing aids I was so self conscious that people were staring at me. And I was still convinced the tests were wrong. Wind surely isn't meant to be *this* loud? How does anyone get anything done??

Turns out the hearing loss I had as a kid wasn't temporary and due to fluid build-up, and didn't get fixed by the tube I had in my ear drum back then. But the ENT doc never did any follow-up tests and assumed it was fine, because I seemed to be hearing better.

And then my 21yo ass had to convince another ENT doc to check it out, which after some more tests revealed I have otosclerosis (unilateral, at least for now). It still took over a year for him to finally decide to resort to surgery, and then over two years for him to allow me to try on a hearing aid, because he thought I "wouldn't feel the difference anyway".

I do, though. I very much do. I've had this hearing aid for two and a half years now, and I'd never go back. It took a year and a half for my brain to relearn how to process the sounds I hadn't heard for so long, and it was all distorted for a while, but it's so, so worth it.