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Please Send a Decoder
A retired scientist rediscovers a love for writing poetry, especially as a way to share her experience with hearing loss and tinnitus. By Sylvia Byrne Pollack I have worn hearing aids since the 1980s but my story begins long before then. In 1945 both my eardrums ruptured. Oral penicillin was not yet available. So there I was in the local hospital at age 4, being injected with the “new” antibiotic every four hours. I recovered well enough to flourish at school, albeit always sitting in the front row. I think that is when I began to watch faces closely, to read lips. Music was an important part of my family’s life. I took piano and flute lessons and sang in the church and school choirs. My hearing was subpar but not enough to keep me from making and enjoying music. I thought I might major in flute in college but before I got that far, Russia launched Sputnik. I changed course, and decided to study science. I earned a B.A. in zoology from Syracuse University, then a Ph.D. in developmental biology from the University of Pennsylvania. In the following few years, I started a family (two wonderful sons!) and developed a career in cancer research—applying for grants, writing and presenting scientific papers, traveling to meetings, teaching, and reviewing grants for the National Institutes of Health. But by the time I was 40, I could no longer ignore the effects of my hearing loss. I missed much that was said in noisy lecture halls, and in the restaurants and pubs where some of the most important scientific exchanges took place after the regular sessions ended. I didn’t hear the beginnings of some sentences or the endings of others. I felt more and more isolated. I thought the problem was me, maybe a personality problem like shyness or fearfulness. At that point in my life, I didn’t appreciate the toll the struggle to hear and understand was taking on me. Years later, I wrote the poem “Prayer Falling on Deaf Ears” (published in “Clover: A Literary Rag” in 2013):
By the time I was 40, I could no longer ignore the effects of my hearing loss. I missed much that was said in noisy lecture halls, and in the restaurants and pubs where some of the most important scientific exchanges took place after the regular sessions ended. 28
hearing health
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Prayer Falling on Deaf Ears Dear God Please send a decoder, an angel with mellifluous voice to perch in the rim of my ear. Make her multi-armed so she can catch, parse and juggle the staccato bursts of racket, soaring sibilants that pass for human speech. Let her have a device to analyze the incoming cacophony, assemble syllables. Give her an algorithm to detect possible words (in English), try them out for meaning in the context of a rapid conversation. What I’m saying, God, is that she must be fast, perceptive, imaginative and indefatigable. Try her out on those words. If you can’t detail an angel to me, perhaps you can put video displays on the forehead of each person I meet. Like supertitles at the opera, their words will scroll gently across, riding the wrinkles. If you’ll do this, I promise to stop nodding inanely, laughing or looking serious at the wrong time. I will be a credit to your handiwork. If you decide to answer me, God, please stand squarely in front of me. Let me see your lips when you speak.
