#clogged ear

Fortunately still before this whole pandemic outbreak, my ear got clogged. It was the first time in my life so I didn't know that the treatment is actually very easy and you know … you would just get your ear cleaned, it's kind of gross but it's over within a minute …

Anyway, since I didn't know how easy it is to get rid of it, I was living effectively partially deaf for three days. In reality I should have had more than a half of my hearing ability preserved but it felt like much less. As long as I was at home, I didn't even notice how bad my hearing was and it was also easy to talk to one person when the surrounding was quiet, no matter whether online or in person. But spending two days in the office was quite painful, and especially when I went to our every-Friday beer with philosophers (my most favorite part of the week), I was feeling almost handicapped. Of course, there is also the foreign language issue and who knows me, knows that my ability to understand spoken words is by far my weakest point in all the foreign languages I have ever tried to learn. But this inability to hear properly was much more uncomfortable than any evening in company of drunk German guys talking in slang and not caring any more that I didn't understand a single word.

It is extremely exhausting: you try moving your head so that you hear better but then you miss someone else. You try to take part in the conversation but you don't react on the whole of someone's talk, only to some parts you have heard. So it's weird. You are always a bit late with your reaction because you didn't catch what a person on the other side of the table had said. You cannot hear yourself properly so you sometimes talk too loud, sometimes too low.

I suddenly learnt – and sort of the hard way – how isolated my grandparents must have felt, why they preferred when their grandchildren visited them one at a time and we didn't change those visits into friendly meetings within our generation during which we were happily talking over each other.

“It cuts you off, doesn't it?” remarked one colleague with a smile. Oh hell yeah …

But then the morning after visiting a clinic I was feeling reborn. No music, no bars … I was enjoying the rustle of the campus, perfectly happy.