Sound and noise

Caird Hall, Dundee

In the local library this week I walked past a woman at an unexciting-looking table of pamphlets. She was from a local hearing charity. After my recent discoveries at the audiologist I went to chat to her. 

She now worked for this charity because, like the woman I saw at the audiologists (who had been a mortgage advisor) her adult son also had hearing loss. Sadly, he had been in a car crash, his jaw had been broken and his hearing damaged. The week that I saw her he was just back from a holiday abroad and had totally lost the hearing in his bad ear. 

- I told him to get straight down to A&E [the hospital emergency department] for a steriod injection in the eardrum.  Then you wait and hope. You used to have to take tablets then lie down for two weeks and hope, she said.  

We live on a noisy planet. I thought things were getting better in the 90s. For a while fashion turned beige and styles were loose and flowing. It was a kinder, more natural look compared to the boxy, shoulder padded 'power and money' styles of the money-grabbing 1980s.  We didn't know then we were comparatively innocent.  Necessity may have forced the climate crisis up the agenda and there are signs of more social responsibility but the world seems busier, louder and more rapacious than ever.  There are no real, large-scale solutions in place to address the issues of traffic and waste avoidance, especially single-use plastic, to name but two.  Not in the UK, at least, not yet and time is running out.

Here in Perth I live on the edge of the town centre opposite a park and a stone's throw from the majestic Tay river.  In many ways it is an enviable location and I am grateful for the sun playing on the trees and the grass that I see through the window even now.  But I also live between a road and a railway. Both have become much noisier in the twelve years we have lived here. The trains are faster and louder. Writing to Scotrail asking for them to slow down in town has had no effect. The trains routinely break the speed limit.  When we first moved in when they crawled past our houses and you could barely hear them.   Traffic has built up too - the sheer volume of it now together with the tractors and trailers bombing through town and the lorries, the motorcycles, the emergency vehicles all adding to the cacophony.  I am lucky that while we sometimes go the busy, polluted, deafening but quick route through town to get to school we can come back through a gorgeous park.  The council doesn't maintain it any more.  It was supposed to be a joint community-council project but I heard that now, apparently, apart from grass-cutting it is maintained by a few volunteers

Rodney Gardens, Perth

These places are havens from noise but land is more often grabbed for development and profit than to create these sanctuaries for people and nature to thrive.  Here is the view this morning from the railway bridge down to the distant road bridge, I had travelled up five minutes before.  You can't see easily in this picture but it is jammed, as is usual now, with traffic.  Pedestrians and bikes invariably accommodate one another on the narrow space of the railway bridge.  I met a nice elderly man at one end.  We said good morning as we passed and  - as we do in Britain - remarked on the fine day.  On a bike or on foot it is a kinder, more humane way to travel.   

Minutes after leaving this bridge four cars passed over the pedestrian crossing I was standing on with my bike, one of them missing me by inches.  This is common and it is why I don't let my son walk to school alone although he is ten.  Frenetic, noisy modern life is not good for us.  It long ago reached the middle of Scotland.

It is not just airport workers and road menders whose hearing is at risk.  In fact, those workers wear hearing defenders so are probably less at risk. Ordinary life can cause hearing problems. The charity worker said that only last week her own mother had been to a concert at the Caird hall in Dundee - a respectable venue where the Royal Scottish National Orchestra plays regularly. She had come home and phoned her daughter saying there was water running somewhere in the house but she couldn't find it.  It turned out to be tinnitus in her ears following the concert.  I rarely go to concerts anymore nor the cinema. The last time we went was to a superb concert by a private school.  But we were in the front row, right next to the pipes and drums which were first on. My younger son scarpered immediately to the safety of his grandparents' seats much further back.  The sound in the cinema is so loud it makes the room vibrate. 

The hearing charity is seeing a rise in teenagers too, suffering not hearing loss but tinnitus from overuse of headphones. Wearing these, like swimming also causes wax to harden in the ears. With, increasingly fewer treatements available on the NHS, syringing the ears is one of those to go. Why? Because I was told recently, water can get where it shouldn't and cause infection. Some of the equipment is quite old (metal syringes) and they can cause damage if they go too far into the ear. There are just a lot of risks which GPs don't want to take. 

What should you do then? NHS guidance is to soften wax by putting a drop or two of olive or almond oil in the ear for two weeks. But stop putting oil in your ears says this specialist. Get a microsuction treatment instead. You can get microsuction on the NHS but apparently, at least in Scotland there is only one audiologist per health board serving 150,000 people.  The waiting time sounded like the way it is for physiotherapy - months and months.   Privately it costs £50-70.  So why don't GPs don't have microsuction? Less because of the cost of equipment apparently and more like the cost of training someone to use it.

Many of us feel that if we can't afford private health the free National Health Service is our only option. But more and more is being cut out of the NHS, some of them things I can remember my parents having treatment for. Moles are no longer removed unless they are a cancer risk and physiotherapy referrals for musculoskeletal (MSK) issues take months. Ears aren't syringed. Travel vaccinations aren't provided, varicose vein removal, tonsillectomy...the list goes on. See the 2018 list here of procedures that have been cut.  There is much sense behind some of these but if you are in constant pain what do you do? 1 in 5 of us are likely to suffer hearing loss.    

But health is really all we have. When that goes, it affects our happiness. our families our friends, the hobbies we have, the things we can do, the places we can go, our children's childhoods. If you can, better pay up. If you can't, I just don't know....My heart goes out to the people with pain or people with MSK problems who can't afford treatments that aren't funded any more or that are in departments that are so over-stretched they will have to wait months for them. 

Inside your ear is the cochlea. Sound doesn't go right there. It is a complicated and delicate business - first there is the ear drum, then three moving bones and then you get the cochlea which is wound up like a snail. If you were to unwind it it would be about this long she showed me with two fingers indicating maybe 10-15cm. The cochlea has hairs on it which turn sound into electrical signals to the brain. Watch the video from the US National Institute on Deafness and other Common Disorder to find out or remember how astonishing this process is. No wonder people took so long to accept evolution as a theory over the "the world had to have been designed" idea. Once you have seen the video you will want to look after this delicate mechanism even more. Age makes these hairs droop she said, so they don't hear so well. But a shock can damage them too, like a firework. 

Can they be restored? I asked.  No. That is why prevention is so important.  Although there is recent research on fish and other creatures where they have managed to regrow similar hairs.  The lady from the charity said that we should be getting a hearing test every 3 years.

- Really? I asked, suprised. From what age? 

- From your 30s.

- Oh! I said, thinking that we know about eye tests and was, it, after all, so different for ears?  Is that, common knowledge? 

- By no means! she said That's is why I stand in libraries telling people this sort of thing. It commonly takes ten years between people first having a hearing concern and getting hearing aids. It is not something many people want to face up to. The tests are free [in Scotland] she said. From Specsavers [a chain of opticians] or Boots [a chain of pharmacies / chemists]. 

We talked about measuring decibels. I had looked into it a little and found that tools to measure sound really need to be calibrated if they are to be accurate and the calibration equipment adds a lot to the cost. I use an app, she said. When I go out with my son if there is a lot of background noise he just can't hear me. She uses it in bars for example to show staff what the music level is compared to what is safe.  She tells them her son has hearing loss and explains to them what the level should be. Wherever possible she chooses places don't play music and that have carpeting and soft furnishing which apparently helps a lot. Wetherspoons [a chain of pubs] apparently, doesn't play music. Who would have thought! 

If your ears don't already warn you, do get that app. It's called Decibel X. It won't be perfect but it's something. In the milonga, if you have to raise your voice to speak to the person next to you, you are,  if you stay, likely to damage your hearing. Practically no DJ will, in my experience, lower the volume enough or at all whether asked directly by attendees or by the organiser.  Most take is a criticism, an affront, not as useful feedback.  But don't risk staying.  Just leave.