"What?" seems to be more and more of my vocabulary lately. I've been having some problems with my hearing. Starting the day after labor day I woke up and I couldn't hear fully in my right ear. Health Services treated me for an ear infection they said I had, although that didn't solve the problem. When I returned they couldn't tell me what the problem still was. Last week I finally had a chance to see a real doctor about this problem. They performed a hearing test and discovered that my left ear is fine but my right is 20-30 dB worse. As you know, decibels are a log scale so that is huge. The good news is that it is not nerve damage. The doctor thought he saw some kind of skin buildup behind my eardrum. On Wednesday I'm going to get a CT scan to see what is back there. If it does end up being what the doctor thought it was then I will probably have to have surgery to remove it. It is a bit of a scary prospect but I am enthusiastic because I will get to hear again.

To get an idea of what my hearing is like right now, put on a pair of headphones connected to your computer. Go into the volume control. Take the balance control and move it all the way to the right and then back about 4 pixel. That is the level that sounds the same to me in both ears.

In addition to the actual hearing loss, I think I have another problem. I find that a lot of the time my problem isn't hearing people it is turning what I hear into words. I feel like I have a harder time that most people at parsing speech if there is any kind of background sound. It is a running joke in my house that my roommate's girlfriend has to translate for my roommate and me because we can't hear each other.