So apparently my hearing ability may be below average? And there is a tiny possibility that I may go deaf?
I am weirdly fine with this.
It's really hard for me to say, though, because - well - I don't really remember a time before my hearing was like this? Not saying I couldn't hear more when I was younger but that it may have been so gradual that I haven't noticed it. I compensate for it really well, but the major issue I have is hearing words over background noise.
I have to have a phrase repeated around three times before I can hear it even over a little bit of music in the room.
@ThatVeryQuinn What was/were the clue(s)?
I've always had language-parsing issues, even when my hearing was fine, but always checking to see if maybe hearing has become an issue too.
@woozle The two biggest issues are my tinnitus (which I've had for a long, long time) and the fact that I have very large amounts of difficulty parsing what people are saying over small bits of background noise. Sometimes even without it, words sound like mumbling or a garbled mess.
@ThatVeryQuinn I do have the background noise issue. I guess that's not so much straight-up attenuation (which is what "hearing loss" always makes me think of), but some kind of reduction in headroom as well... things don't sound disorted, though, so not sure what's happening acoustically.
Also the tinnitus, which has definitely gotten worse but isn't loud enough to interfere with anything else, as far as I can tell.
@woozle I getcha! From what I understand, hearing-loss is difficulty receiving the stimulus, whereas an audio processing problem is converting the stimulus into a brain pattern.
For example, I thought I had an audio processing problem, but more recently we've been finding that the words just don't get to me, rather than I'm not turning them into words.
The tinnitus isn't loud enough to interfere for me, yet, but to be honest it is persistent. Whenever there's loud enough noise or it's totally silent, I've got this constant ringing in my ears that I just thought was normal. I dunno.
@ThatVeryQuinn One further thought: while I'm pretty sure that my parsing issue is mainly a processing thing rather than a hearing thing, attenuation of higher frequencies (which I can tell has gotten worse, slowly, over the decades) definitely makes it harder because there aren't as many cues to help distinguish between phonemes.
I need to get an actual hearing test done before I make any definitive statements, but according to Nova, what I thought was an audio processing disorder is more likely due to being hard of hearing that I've compensated for.