On the Flipside

 The other day an online friend posted this and tagged me:

And of course it resonated.  I responded:  "Yep. Screaming babies on planes, stupid people bellowing into cell phones, it all goes away. Silence can be a refuge."

And as my late friend and CI sister used to say, being able to turn it off is my superpower!  And it does feel like that.  

Today is laundry day at my house, and my husband wanted me to wash his work jacket - one of those yellowish ones that you see at Fleet Farm and Menards.  So I did, and popped it in the dryer, and holy moly.  It was BANGING on the sides of the dryer.  We realized that it was the little plastic knob thingies on the hood cord ends, and took them off, and that made it a bit quieter, but the weight of the jacket was such that it thudded against the dryer drum every second or so.

After a while it started to feel as though someone were pounding on my head rather than just a jacket hitting the dryer wall, and I popped my processors off - I don't need to hear to knit, after all. 

This is, I think, related to the issues that people with CIs and hearing aids have with background noise - that is, you can't tune anything out.  Whatever noises are in your general vicinity get amplified along with any voices that you may want to hear, and it's occasionally excruciating.

It certainly doesn't outweigh the benefits of being able to hear again - far, far from it.  But boy howdy can it be annoying, and it's actually really nice that I *can* take my processors off and take refuge in silence.

Take that, jacket.  You're not worth my batteries.

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