Coping

 

In 1968, when I was 45, the hearing in my right ear went down the tube. It happened very suddenly-over a couple of days. Five years later, the hearing in my left ear went in the same direction but not to zero. It happened over a longer period time but in much the same fashion-fluctuations in my loss of hearing ending in a nearly total loss of hearing. At the time, I was a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and teaching elementary economics with an enrollment of 1,000 students per semester. In 1975, I shifted to an honors class in economics with an enrollment of 66, which I continued to teach until I retired in 1985, but neither the change in teaching nor my retirement was associated, in any way, with the hearing loss.