As I relaunch this website, I thought it appropriate to share this article I wrote for the Globe & Mail about my personal struggle with hearing loss. 

The Ramones were only a few feet away.  Flanked by stacks of amps they launched into a sonic assault that rattled the small nightclub, and left my ears ringing for days.  Alas, Joey and the most of the boys are all gone now, and so is most of my hearing.

I was about 50 when I began to notice that people were mumbling, some of their words were going missing and songbirds had stopped singing.  “Pardon?”, became my all too frequent contribution to conversations. My hearing was fading prematurely, particularly my ability to distinguish higher frequency sounds.

I am not alone. According to the U.S. National Council on Aging, about 15% of Americans over the age of 20 have some degree of hearing loss. That’s about 45 million people.  For those over 65, that percentage jumps to 30%.  Frankly, those numbers aren’t to be trusted since so many people simply refuse to admit they have a problem.

I have struggled to overcome my own tendency toward denial, and even now I write this with some trepidation.  No one wants to concede they are getting older, or fess up to having what can be an embarrassing affliction.

It’s an invisible handicap but the deniers are easy for me to spot.  They cock their heads to one side in an unconscious attempt to aim their better ear toward someone.  They inject off topic non-sequiturs into conversations. Or they nod and smile when I tell them an old friend has died.

I now sport hearing aids in part because I don’t want people to think I am an idiot.

We are all losing our hearing from virtually the day we are born.  We arrive in this world equipped with about 30,000 hair cells, those tiny vibration detectors in the cochlea.  They convert the vibrations from our ear drums into electrical signals that are sent to the brain.

They are killed off over the years by noise induced damage, certain drugs or a genetic predisposition.  Once they are gone, they never grow back.

I am losing those precious cells at a faster rate than most.  That’s likely due to a rogue gene that makes me more susceptible to noise damage.  It was passed onto me by mother and she became almost completely deaf.

I am pretty sure that Frank Sinatra never performed at jet engine decibel levels so I fear that I am going deaf at faster rate than her.  But I refuse to surrender to silence.

My hearing aids are indispensable.  Without them, I understand only about 40% of what’s being said. With them on, I score about 90% on word recognition tests which means I am fairly functional.  But that number drops dramatically in a crowded room or if I am confronted with a low talker.

Today’s hearing aids are marvellous pieces of technology.   No longer are they crude amplifiers that simply pump up the volume.  Now they can capture sound, then process it and deliver the specific frequencies that you are missing.  They have evolved into mini computers that are the product of the same digital revolution that produced the cell phone.

My hearing aids connect to my phone invisibly via a wireless bluetooth connection. That allows me to clearly hear phone calls or music, and to adjust them for better sound in different environments.

They can also perform another neat trick.  With a couple of clicks I can set them so that they receive the sound from my phone’s microphone.   Then I can discreetly slide the phone across the table a spot near the person talking so their voice is isolated and clearer.   Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this but I can also leave the room and hear what people are saying about me.

When I look to the future, I sometimes wish I were a chicken.  Researchers have discovered that if you deafen a chicken by killing its hair cells within a few days they grow back.  That’s raised the tantalizing question:  What if there’s a way to make human hair cells perform the same trick?

Or maybe I should wish that I were a mouse.  In the natural scheme things, mice like other mammals including us cannot re-grow dead hair cells.  But now they can, at least in the laboratory. There is now a world-wide hunt underway for a cure for hearing loss.

As one researcher told me, “Big Pharma has finally woken up”, and is devoting more and more resources to the search. No surprise there since my fellow boomers are well on the way to becoming the deafest generation. The demand for any cure would be astronomical.

The consensus among the researchers is that it will be at least five to ten years before any treatment that could even remotely be called a cure will come to market.

In the meantime, I take heart in knowing that hearing aids and cochlear implants are getting better and better.

Still, as the saying goes an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  I was reminded of that old saw recently at a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game.  The players were propelled onto the ice for the face-off by a deluge of decibels courtesy of AC/DC.  My wife covered her ears and I turned off my hearing aids.  I still heard the riffs too loud if not too clear.

A young family were sitting a couple of rows below us.  Their two little boys leapt to their feet and bounced up and down with excitement.  Both of them were wearing ear protectors of the sort used by ground crews at airports.

Smart Mom and Dad I thought.  Yet after the game it seemed virtually every fan under thirty began popping in their ear buds as they were leaving the building.  They probably weren’t listening to The Ramones but I imagined I could hear the screams of dying hair cells.