By Helen Garrett
For several summers, my husband Steve and I attended Celebrate Brooklyn Concerts in Prospect Park with friends. We always sat in the front section. None of us wore hearing protection. During many of the concerts the bass was extremely loud, causing pain in my ears. I complained about it, and would stuff napkins in my ears to try to block the sound. It never occurred to us to wear earplugs, and my guess is that many people there weren’t wearing them either.
Two summers ago we went to a David Crosby concert at Lincoln Center Outdoors, and because people were blocking my view (and the concert was that good), I went close to the stage—and the speakers. The music didn’t seem loud, but two nights later I woke in the middle of the night with an alarming, high-pitched buzz in my right ear. I got out of bed and went looking for the origin of the sound—in the guest room, out the window—and woke my husband and asked him what it was. When I realized it was all in my head, I dropped to the floor in a complete panic, terrified it would never go away.
The next day I saw an ENT doctor and had a hearing test that revealed a mild to moderate hearing loss in my right ear. The doctor recommended steroid shots, which didn’t help, nor did a change in diet. For the first two to three months, I had occasional bouts of severe tinnitus, and a couple of times a mild vertigo, but both eventually went away. Nowadays the tinnitus is always there, but it is rarely as debilitating as it was those first couple of months.
After getting tinnitus from concert-going without hearing protection, and learning about the cumulative effect of hearing damage from her work on HHF’s Keep Listening prevention campaign, Helen (shown with her husband Steve) now regularly wears earplugs in loud environments, including when using everyday appliances.
Despite all this, including owning earplugs, it didn’t occur to me until working on the Keep Listening prevention campaign for Hearing Health Foundation (HHF) how damage to your hearing is cumulative, and that I’ve been doing additional damage to my hearing through some of my daily routines.
My coffee grinder, used daily, is 90 decibels or more, as is our mini food processor. (I know this thanks to the decibel measuring apps I learned about from HHF.) I now use earplugs when I run noisy appliances.
Since I developed tinnitus, restaurants are often not enjoyable because of ambient noise. At parties, it’s hard for me to follow conversations when multiple people are talking, and I often ask to have music turned down. If Steve says something to me in bed and my good ear is on the pillow I can't hear what he is saying.
It’s Not Just About Losing Your Hearing
I’m now aware that my quality of life and overall health could be more adversely affected. The strong connection between hearing loss and dementia has also been a real eye opener. I’ve become a passionate evangelist about the importance of hearing protection and the urgent need to make everyone more aware of the dangers of noise-induced hearing loss. We need to make this issue as mainstream as wearing seatbelts or using sunscreen.
This campaign has also underscored for me the need to make our very noisy world much quieter. There is so much unnecessary excess noise in the world, including the idea that “fun equals loud.” For our collective health, and the health of all the world’s creatures, we must turn down the volume.
The chorus to one of my favorite Joni Mitchell songs applies to so many of us: “Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got/Till it’s gone.” There’s no question in my mind that if I had known what it would be like to have my hearing impaired, I would have taken many more precautions. I took my hearing for granted until I had a problem. I hope we can convince more people—of all ages—to protect their hearing.
Helen Garrett lives in New York and is a consultant to nonprofits on branding, marketing, and social impact campaigns. While on staff at Amnesty International USA she helped create two benefit albums, the first featuring the songs of John Lennon with artists like U2 and Green Day, and the second the songs of Bob Dylan with Adele, Sting, and more. See Keep Listening.
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