Loudish and Clearish

"You ought to get your hearing tested."

"Why?"

"Sometimes you don't hear a word I say!"

"What?"

At times I get so engrossed in a Sudoku puzzle or my daily French lesson that I hardly hear what's going on around me. I call it selective deafness!  Joking aside, though, I reckon that my hearing is pretty good. However, I am aware that it isn't as acute as it once was, particularly if I'm trying to pick out a voice in a crowd, and especially if that voice is high-pitched.

At my age, my GP would doubtless be willing to refer me for a hearing test, but so far I've not been motivated to book an appointment with him. My opticians are also offering free hearing tests, but I don't really trust them as they appear much too keen to sell folk hearing aids costing several hundreds of pounds.  If ever I do need hearing aids, I'm unashamedly resolved to go for the free NHS variety.  With long hair over my ears they'll be as invisible as the expensive ones.

Back in October my friend Lucy blogged about her worries that she may have damaged her ears by playing music too loudly through earbuds. To check this out, she installed a Hearing Test app on her smartphone and was delighted to discover that all was well. Now that really did sound interesting, so I too downloaded the app.

It's important to stress that this is certainly not a 'proper' hearing test; it's only a guide, but a useful one nonetheless. I've tested my hearing over a several days and there's little variation in the results. Here's the latest one...

Mmmm. It's certainly not as good as Lucy's and shows all too clearly that I'm suffering from moderate hearing loss above 6kHz. My left ear (blue line) is slightly worse than my right, which is interesting as that's the ear in which I suffer from mild tinnitus - a whistling sound at about 7kHz.  At times, though, the tinnitus lifts completely and it would be interesting indeed to repeat the test then.

The previous graph was moderately worrying, but this one was more reassuring. It shows the same results, but plotted against a range of age norms. By that measure, I'm just about average for a 71 year-old. 

Growing old gracefully... that's me!