About a little of what I do day to day. Basically I test people's hearing.
First I check in people's ear to make sure their ears look fine. Then I jam this probe thingy into their tight little ear canals, blow some air, and play some loud beeps to test the involuntary reflexes of their middle ear. Afterwards, I throw them into this claustrophobic inducing sound booth where I proceed to administer the hearing test. The sound booth has all the comfort of an electrocution room. There is a chair, a lot of wires and a Jeapordy clicker. A patient of mine once jokingly commented that he is afraid he would receive a shock for the incorrect/ nil response. If only he knew, if only... bless his heart, it must have been quite a jolt for him when I "accidentally" turn on the speakers a bit too loud... sound, after all, is a form of energy very much like electricity.
It begins with speech recognition which, believe it or not, has all the hallmarks of repeating back the order to the attendant through the drive thru speakers. I use probe words like hot dog, pancake, and ice cream over and over again, until the sound of the patient's stomach's grumbling is louder than my voice. To make it worst, my voice gets softer and softer until the patient can barely hear me. If this was indeed happening in real life, either the person would be throwing a fit at me for not enunciating, articulating and projecting correctly; or be completely disturbed by the fact that I am whispering to them. Either scenario, I would most likely end up beaten to a pulp. Instead, in the sound booth, I have complete control of them. I make them crave hearing my voice, their necks craning at insane angles trying to capture every little thing I utter. In the beginning, there was the word, and I spoke those words... muwahahaha.
Next, we move on to beeps. Here, the patient are presented with tone emitted at different frequencies at varying intensities until I can find their thresholds. Often times, patients end up feeling like they are hallucinating as the beeps they hear tends to be softer than the sound of blood pulsating through the veins in their ears.So paranoid they would become; every breath they take, every rustle of their clothing, every heartbeat could literally mean the difference between life and deaf. Why beeps you may ask, well, I am not quite sure yet, but I think for me it works perfectly to drown out the curses coming from me and/or the patient as we struggle to negotiate their thresholds. Some thresholds are quite elusive, as loudness is quite subjective. A person's perception of what they hear is all relative, and finding that exact perception takes a lot of relating back and forth. Hence, the repeated beeping.
When we are done beeping at each other, we have words again, sometimes a paragraph or two, but mostly words. This part is called word recognition, and it is often quite amusing to hear back what the patient thought I have said. I have captured quite a few Freudian slips... and let's just said some of the probe words are not all that innocent sounding either; like the words ditch, nag, whole... definitely got some confused stares when I had patients repeat those words back to me.
Finally, we move on to what we call bone conduction. Here, we have clinically proven that the saying "I can't get anything pass that thick skull of yours" is false. In fact, we have discovered when all else fails, a patient with a thick skull may actually hear better if we transmit the sound directly through the skull. Something about more particles in the bone medium for the conduction of sound than through air alone. Anyway, its pretty dandy to see the bone conduction at work.
Of course, I am over simplifying everything here. There is much science behind many of the techniques I used to test hearing - for instance what I am really doing when I am looking into patient's ear (I have been told if i stare hard enough, I can either see through to the other side, or China- my country of origin).
So, there you have it, I hear deaf people.
No comments:
Post a Comment