FTV: Hear, Hear

     In the May 8, 2026 edition Green Sheets, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a headline feature entitled ‘Awareness about hearing loss raised by Jane Lynch’.  Lynch is a 65-year-old actress and comedian who many will remember for her role as the, ‘ruthless cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on Glee’.  This wasn’t a show I had watched but it raised Lynch’s profile enough that it seems to have helped her land some pretty lucrative TV gigs hosting a variety of game shows.  That she is now an advocate encouraging people with hearing loss to not ignore the problem and seek help compelled me to read on.  Jane acknowledged that she was completely aware of what was happening to her own hearing early on.  We will take a deeper dive into how Lynch became a hearing loss advocate in a minute.  What drew me into her story was the similarity of how Jane recognized what was happening to her own hearing and my own experiences.  The difference is, my troubles started in my mid-thirties and her problems didn’t arise until she was twenty years older than that.

     Growing up in a house with two active smokers, I had my share of sinus infections when I was in elementary school.  All too often my clogged head left my hearing somewhat dulled until things cleared up.  Being one of the few kids I knew who never had their tonsils removed, it was never clear if that exacerbated my situation.  Thankfully my mother stopped smoking in my early teens but it took my father confronting his own breathing problems in his seventies before he finally went cold turkey.  The bottom line here:  I grew up accustomed to periods when my hearing was compromised for short periods of time, but there was never any permanent damage.

     Cut to the 1980s.  Before smoking in the teacher’s lounge went the way of the dinosaurs, I had avoided similar workplace health troubles by eating lunch in my classroom.  Working closely with a large assortment of kids, illness still found its way into my head from time to time with the same old effects on my hearing.  After catching a bug on a field trip to Marquette, I kept waiting for my hearing to rebound.  When it didn’t after a month, I visited Dr. Lahti who proclaimed that whatever illness I had was gone.  He suggested a visit to an Ear – Throat –  Sinus specialist in Marquette to investigate what was going on.  

     My appointment in Marquette didn’t start well.  The technician who was sending various beeps into my headphones opened up my little phonebooth size compartment and said, “You are supposed to raise your left or right hand when you hear a tone on that side!  You haven’t raised your left hand at all”  I said, “That is because I haven’t heard any tones on that side yet.”  She returned to her control panel and upped the volume some at which point she got the left hand signals she was seeking (and a window into my referral to their office).

     The doctor who examined me hemmed and hawed over my hearing test report.  He looked in my ear canals and then put a small probe in each ear that made an audible hum.  He showed me the readout and explained it showed how my eardrums responded to the tone.  It was supposed to rise to a peak and then gradually return to the baseline where the graph started.  That is what the chart for my right ear showed.   My left ear, however, started the upslope part, then flattened out like the top of a mesa.  “This isn’t what we want to see so I am going to send you downstairs for a scan,” the doc told me.

     An hour later, he gave me the run down:  “The scan did not show any tumors on your auditory nerve which could cause this.  We will do one more scan in six months just to make sure.  You said you had a head cold before this deficit occurred.  It was probably a virus and it knocked out the middle and lower frequency response in your left ear.  It may or may not come back but you are lucky.  This same thing can happen to people and they lose their sense of smell or taste.”  He read my mind and continued, “And at this time, there isn’t anything we can do for it.”  Six months later, the second scan for any tumors on the nerves was also negative so I began to adapt to the situation.

     The first thing I became aware of was how hard it was to track conversation when there was a lot of background noise.  When “I am sorry, could you repeat that?” got to be a tiring routine, my only solution was to buckle down and concentrate on who was speaking.  In essence, I learned how to read lips.  This helped in many situations but not when someone was facing away from me when they spoke.  I got good enough at it that when a student was not paying attention in class, I would take them in the hall, repeat to them what they had been talking about in the back row, and suggest they remember my new superpower.  This tactic worked so well,  my classes were given fair warning at the beginning of each year that the teacher in the front of the room had the ability to ‘listen’ to what they were saying via my newly honed skills.  This helped in school, but not in all situations.  Not being able to hold a phone to my left ear (it always sounded like whoever was on the line was talking to me from a cave) or to hear well in loud locations was not painful, but it was a pain.

     Those who knew my history of playing drums in rock bands would nod and say, “Oh, that loud music made you deaf.”  It probably didn’t help the situation, but the combined effects of loud music and ‘presbycusis’ (age-related hearing loss) took another twenty five years to affect my right side hearing.  As for Lynch, she was in the middle run of Glee around 2012 when she began experiencing the same signs of hearing loss I had encountered.  She began avoiding loud situations like restaurants and maintaining conversations at work.  She says, “It just got to be too much to try and listen to these young whippersnappers talking to the old lady.  And it made me feel old.”

     She wasn’t alone – according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, hearing loss is the third most common chronic physical ailment in the country after high blood pressure and arthritis.  The World Health Organization estimates that by 2050, 2.5 billion people will have some degree of hearing loss.  The realization hit Lynch right between the eyes because of what her father had gone through with his own hearing loss in the past.

     “I had experienced it with what happened to my dad, how he kind of started to recede,” Jane told USA Today’s Charles Trepany.  “I refused to do that.”  When her late father, Frank Lynch, began to have trouble, he refused to seek help.  She explained that hearing aides at that time were bulky and large which  would have made it obvious to everyone that he had a problem,  Lynch firmly believes he did not want to be seen as being disabled.  “My dad was a very gregarious guy, very positive and happy, but you couldn’t talk to him about that,” she says.  “And that was back in the day when hearing aids were that big, and it meant disabled.  So my dad didn’t want that at all.  When he eventually did cave in and get them, he didn’t wear them very often.”

     “So finally, he’s 75 years old,” she says.  “He can’t hear a thing,  He’s not the gregarious guy he used to be.  He’s really muted.  And so, my mom talked him into going to a hearing doctor, and he got little hearing aids that he never charged.  He’d never use them.  There was such a stigma in him, and I think it’s his generation, too.”  Lynch told Trepany that she views hearing aids as being no more significant than wearing glasses to see, but some people still have more shame about hearing aids than they do glasses.  “Perhaps,” she says, “because hearing aids have a stronger association with aging than glasses do.  In our society, anyway, it feels like a disability, so people won’t do anything about hearing loss.  They think a hearing aid is the most embarrassing thing in the world, even though you can’t even see them anymore.”

     Past experience tells me that denial is all too often the first reaction to diminished hearing.  In a speech at the SWITCH:  Vision Innovation Summit in March of 2026, Lynch detailed the first subtle signs of her father’s hearing loss:  “The television in their home started getting louder.  He’d ask people to repeat themselves at dinner conversations.”  No doubt about it –  I recognized the same things in my own experiences.  If one does not think they have a hearing problem, ask your immediate family members about the ‘what did you say?’ moments.  Most will tell you exactly how annoying it can be.  I would often wait until we were on the way home from some social function to ask my wife about conversations I could not hear in noisy locations.

     Lynch’s take on people wearing glasses reminded me of my own eyesight revelations.  My mother wore glasses as long as I can remember but my father did not need them until he was in his fifties.  I must have inherited his eyesight because at about the same age, my first visit to get an evaluation went something like this:  Dr:  “So what brings you in today?”  Me:  “I think it is time for me to get reading glasses.”  Dr:  “Really?  Nobody comes in here asking for glasses.  They usually want to find out why they are having trouble reading fine print or why they are getting headaches when they read.”  Me:  “Yep, that is exactly why I am here, but I already know why and what the solution is.”

     There was a thirty year span between my initial hearing loss and my retirement.  Within certain limitations, I was able to function reasonably well using my lip reading skills.  Everytime I would listen to music with headphones, all it took was to set the balance a little farther to the left side to even things out.  My wife noticed that when she would talk to me, I had a tendency to turn my head to the left to put my ‘good ear’ toward her.  Driving in the car wasn’t much of a problem with my left ear facing away from her, but it caused some awkward moments when we would be listening to the radio.  Her hearing, being much better than mine, meant she wanted the radio set at a lower volume.  This meant there were a lot of things said on air that passed me by completely.  I knew it was getting serious when I didn’t recognize Deep Purple’s version of Kentucky Women.  I had to ask my wife, “Who is Charlie Walnut?” which I am sure made her wonder if I was the nut in question.  With my retirement in 2018, the plan was to finally get a re-evaluation on my hearing situation. 

      The plan slipped a few years when our son needed eye surgery to correct a torn retina in 2020 and 2021.  My visit to the hearing clinic was postponed again in the fall of 2023 when my wife survived a 99 percent blockage of what is known as ‘the widow maker’ (left anterior descending artery).  During the months that followed, she needed weekly rehab trips to Houghton and my decades-old problem was not on the top of the list of medical priorities until the fall of 2025.  We waded through all of the information that kept popping up on the subject and decided there was no point investing in anything on my own without getting an updated hearing evaluation.  Our  thought was, “Could the technology now exist that was not available to help with my particular problem as diagnosed forty years ago?”

     Doing the intake interview with the doctor, she was not at all surprised why I was there considering my age.  She expressed some concern when she learned about my virus induced hearing loss but reserved further comment until we were done with the battery of hearing tests.

Back in the day, my results were displayed on paper.  In this case, Dr. Fischer was able to flip between various computer screens to analyse what the tests showed.  “I was worried when you mentioned how the left ear deficit happened because there are cases where virus damage can not be reversed,”  she explained.  She put up a two line chart comparing my left and right hearing profiles and continued, “Except for a bit of a mismatch on the lower frequency end, both ears show a similar pattern.  There is some age-related deficit but it looks like we will be able to correct what is going on with both ears.”

     The next step was what the doctor called ‘their test drive’ program.  She set me up with a loaner set of hearing aids she was able to tune specifically for my ears.  After a two week try out, the next appointment provided even more data to help me make a final decision about which model of hearing aids to order.  What she hadn’t told us before was that each hearing aid collected data.  When she plugged them into her computer, it told her how many hours a day I had worn them and the different kinds of ‘hearing environments’ I had been in (crowded rooms, watching TV, listening to radio, and so on).  She said, “Oh, you have had them on for ‘X’ number of hours a day, that’s very good.”  She was even happier when informed that a) I really liked what I could now hear and b) could not wait until I had my own set.  

     Obviously, there are different levels of affordability built into the products available.  The loaners I was given were the top of the line model.  There were certain features I did not feel were necessary now that I am not working with a roomful of Jr High students everyday so my choice was one step down from the ‘Cadillac’ model but still a couple of levels above the basic ‘VW Bug’ model.  Once I got accustomed to hearing things like the squeak of my shoes on the  floor tiles and the sound of turning the pages in a book, I realized how much I had not been hearing in the world around me.  Dr. Fischer let me keep the loaners until my new set came in and after one more visit for them to be adjusted, there has not been a day where they haven’t been in use.  “How do you like them?” she asked on my last visit.  “I love them and many nights, I have to remind myself to put them charging because I totally forget I am wearing them.”

     Before coming across the article about Jane Lynch’s experience, I had already seen a lot of information about the connection between hearing loss and Alzheimer’s disease.  Lynch expanded on these topics when she pointed out, “One of the biggest tolls of hearing loss is how it makes connecting with others so much more difficult.  This challenge often leads many with hearing loss to recede from life.  So many who struggle silently either fade into the background at social gatherings or avoid going out entirely.”  This kind of isolation is not a good way to maintain a healthy brain.

     Don’t let all of those excuses get in the way of taking action if you are experiencing hearing loss.  Yes, it will cost a little money but it is worth it in terms of improving one’s life.  If you think no one notices your hearing loss, you are wrong.  The odds are they will not notice your hearing aids as much as they recognize your hearing problems without them.   If you won’t take my word for it, surely a celebrity like Jane Lynch wouldn’t steer you wrong, would she?  

     By the way, October is National Audiology Awareness Month and is dedicated to educating the public on hearing health, noise-induced hearing loss, and the importance of professional hearing evaluations.  It emphasizes that untreated hearing loss is a major, yet often hidden, health concern linked to cognitive decline, dementia, and fall risks.  You do not have to wait until October to seek help.  More information can be found by searching for the American Academy of Audiology website.  

Top Piece Video:  Okay, The Who tackle a different ‘disability’ but it is kind of hard to find songs about losing one’s hearing!  Woodstock generation, get those ears checked!