How a Typing Accident Immediately Made Me Deaf In One Ear
Photo courtesy of Alexandr Ivanov Pixabay
“Own your identity. Love who you are in the world. Love your deafness.”
— Nyle DiMarco
Yes, you read that title correctly. And no, there’s no punchline. I have been deaf in one ear for a few decades after a typing accident.
I don’t know what else to call it. An accident is an unexpected event. And I had a most unexpected event while typing one day that resulted in my Single-Sided Deafness (SSD).
Back in the Dark Ages before computers, I worked from home as a single parent supporting my kids with the only marketable skill I had at the time — typing.
In particular, I typed transcripts on a self-employed basis for a Court Reporting firm.
I was so excited to have found work that I could do on my own time, working around my parenting responsibilities. I set up an office in my home, rented an IBM “Selectric” typewriter and a dictaphone, and got a desk and a proper secretarial-type chair.
Reading their steno machine notes, the Court Reporters would dictate the proceedings onto cassette tapes, which I would get along with case notes. I just had to listen to the tapes, type exactly what they said, and get the transcript back by the deadline.
I got paid per page and because I was an exceptionally fast typist, I could do 100–120 pages in a day with no trouble.
In fact, I typed too fast for the typewriter. I’d got the Selectric because instead of type bars (or “strikers”), it had a ball with all the characters on it. This was supposed to help speedy typists by eliminating the issue of the type bars jamming.
But as it turned out, I was too fast for the ball, too. The poor thing just couldn’t spin quickly enough. If I tried to go faster than about 90–95 wpm, it would leave a sort of splat of ink between two partial letters.
Eventually, I was thrilled to discover a super cool, “new-fangled gadget” — an electronic typewriter. It had an LED screen just above the top row of keys that would show the current line I was typing before printing it. This allowed me to make any corrections before hitting “return,” when it would then print while I carried on typing the next line into the screen.
(Trust me, all of this is relevant if I’m going to tell this story properly).
Computer keyboards are so lovely and quiet but oh, my, those old typewriters — whether manual, electric, or electronic — I swear, they were enough to wake the dead.
And that fancy electronic baby I’d got — well, I absolutely adored it! It was ridiculously loud, but it got the job done, printing at 160 wpm with no jammed strikers, no ink splats — just perfect, neat-as-a-pin, beautiful words.
I loved that I was pretty much keeping up with it, finishing typing one line into the screen just as it finished printing the previous line. This is how I know my typing speed is about 160 wpm.
It also made for continuous typing as line after line, I kept up with the typewriter so there were few, if any, momentary breaks in the steady pounding of my machine.
Okay, Let’s Set the Stage
I was pretty chummy with the Court Reporters. Somewhere along the way, just for fun (and because I’m ridiculously curious and love to learn), I asked one of them, Darcy, to show me how to read the notes from the steno machine. The machine has just 22 keys and uses only some of the letters of the alphabet to produce a highly complex, phonetic language all its own.
Darcy showed me how to read it on a Friday afternoon and by Monday, I had it memorised and was able to figure out how a lot of words would look.
For example, the word “No” would look like this, with all five keys struck at once:
(Photo by this author)
Darcy was beyond impressed with how quickly I caught on and immediately hired me to be her note-reader. This meant that I would listen to the original tape of the proceedings, plus read the steno machine notes at the same time to produce her transcripts, thus saving her the time and tedium of dictation.
Apparently, it’s a two-year course to learn how to be a note-reader, but I had done it in a weekend. That was fun.
And without having any intention of it, it meant that I doubled my income almost overnight, as the other Court Reporters were quick to hire me, too.
The Accident
One of the reporters, I’ll call him “Doug,” was painfully slow with the steno machine. This meant his notes were always incomplete. Dropped sentences, missing words and phrases…I’m not sure how he ever passed the two-year course (she says, raising an eyebrow and knowing that his dad owned the Court Reporting company).
Because of his poor notes, I had to rely heavily on his recordings of the proceedings. This could be a challenge; there was often background noise with papers shuffling, water glasses on the table, people clearing throats, coughing, etc.
One day, I settled in to do a case for Doug. I popped the tape into the dictaphone and put on my headset. The sound came through mainly on the right but could also be heard more quietly on the left.
As I was getting set up, I noticed a note from Doug. The witness was Italian with a thick accent.
He was very quiet.
He mumbled.
(Oh, dear, this will be hard work…especially with Doug’s poor notes.)
And the witness had a bad cold and was congested. It was extra difficult to understand him on top of the above issues.
(Oy vey.)
Doug said that because of all of this, he had put the microphone directly in front of the witness (i.e. where you’d find a dinner plate), with the microphone in the 6:00 position.
(Okay, good mic placement; maybe there’s hope for this case yet.)
I got everything up and running. I slid a sheet of transcript paper into the typewriter, threaded the stack of steno notes through the note-reading machine, and started it scrolling the paper with one foot (on a pedal) while the other foot got the dictaphone going.
Type-ity type type type, away I went, and oh, my, that witness was so hard to understand!
Especially with my jackhammer typewriter steadily pounding away at 160 wpm like rapid machine-gun fire.
Straining to hear the quiet, mumbling, thickly-accented witness with a bad head cold, I cranked the dictaphone to full volume in an attempt to hear him over the typewriter.
(Ah, better, but still a strain.)
And then it happened.
With the microphone right under his mouth, he coughed. Directly into it. Loudly.
Instantly, I felt a searing pain in my right ear and to a lesser extent, pain in the left one, too. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said someone had just jammed a dagger deep into the side of my head.
The Doctor Is In
The pain persisted for the next few days. Eventually, I thought perhaps I ought to see the doc so off I went.
He referred me to an audiologist. I was put through a series of hearing tests in a cool little soundproof room. At the end of it, he had me wait in his office while he retrieved all the results.
On his return, he advised me that I’d lost virtually all of the hearing in my right ear due to an “acoustic trauma” (a fancy-pants name for a loud noise. So why don’t they just call it that?). I’d lost some in the left, too, but I don’t remember if he said how much.
I do know he said there was nothing that could be done. And I know he did not mention the numerous challenges that I would face in the coming years — which might have been a blessing, if I’m honest. I was so young and might not have appreciated hearing the list at that time. I had more than enough on my plate and was already sadly lacking a support system.
He didn’t have much to say about it so I wasn’t too bothered. I figured, “Well, I’ve got one good ear, I can still hear. No biggy.”
And off I went.
The Fallout
Not having had any inkling that my hearing loss could cause any trouble, I got on with my life and didn’t give it any thought. I learned to compensate where necessary but had no idea that it was the reason for certain difficulties I was having.
As my challenging life unfolded with numerous health issues and other problems, it took a few decades before I learned that SSD was likely the culprit for far more of them than I knew.
In fact, it can produce a wide variety of daily challenges at home and on the job. For example:
Cognitive overload that exhausts the brain
Potentially dangerous situations if you can’t hear an imminent threat
Difficulty concentrating
Impaired memory
Difficulty hearing with background noise, crowds etc.
Social anxiety and isolation
Extreme sensitivity to noise
and more…
There are numerous causes of hearing loss, many of which have a variety of treatment options. If you notice that you’re struggling to hear in certain situations, see your doctor.
And if you develop sudden hearing loss, see your doctor immediately.
Often, the sooner you get there, the better your chances of preventing a long-term or permanent problem.
For more information on how SSD can impact your life or how you can help others who have it, please check out my article below: