SUBTITLING YOUR LIFE

Advances in transcription are good news for the hard of hearing.

- BY DAVID OWEN

There is no better time in human history to be a person with hearing loss.

A little over thirty years ago, when he was in his mid-forties, my friend David Howorth lost all hearing in his left ear, a calamity known as single-sided deafness. “It happened literally overnight,” he said. “My doctor told me, ‘We really don’t understand why.’” At the time, he was working as a litigator in the Portland, Oregon, of fice of a large law firm. (He and his family had moved there from New York after one of his daughters pricked a finger on a discarded syringe while climbing on rocks in Prospect Park.) His hearing loss had no impact on his job— “In a courtroom, you can get along fine with one ear”—but other parts of his life were upended. The brain pinpoints sound sources in part by analyzing minute differences between left-ear and right-ear arrival times, the same process that helps bats and owls find prey they can’t see. Now that Howorth had just one working ear, he didn't know where to look when someone called his name on a busy sidewalk. In groups, he would pretend to follow what others were saying, nodding occasionally. “Even when I knew the topic, I was reluctant to join in for fear of being somewhat off point, or, worse, saying the same thing that someone else had just said,” he recalled. At dinner parties, his wife, Martha, always tried to sit on his left, so that he wouldn't have to explain to a stranger why he had failed to respond.