I've been really, really struggling with mood and my internal clock's still a mess, and I'm missing two lovely families that have moved out in the last couple of months.
However, after a lifetime of having so little confidence in other people's views of me that it was always the other person that initiated the friendship, I'm feeling pleased that there is a relationship I turned from 'used to see in meetings years ago, bump into in the street sometimes' into 'friendship', with my big reaching out a year ago. Also, I'm getting slightly more confident with asking neighbours for help.
I bought a laptop a year and a half ago, struggled, crashed it, couldn't cope, chickened out. In the summer a local kid helped set it up, but then I still struggled to be brave enough to use it. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to conceptualise it as a toy to play with and started doing online puzzles on it...
Then this week, I've had problems trying to send some pictures to my GP. People on a different messageboard helped me and put their explanations on my laptop and tried to do it on my desktop, but my desktop browser kept crashing when I tried to use the GPs messaging system.
So finally, thanks to those lovely online people, I plucked up courage to swap laptop and desktop, and try to do it on my laptop. The GP messaging system has timed out for me to respond to, but that's ok, I can call on Monday and get another reference.
Meanwhile, I'm very frustrated with my local hospital audiology clinic. For many, many years, I've had hearing aids from them. When they need adjusting or replacing, I go into the drop-in and it gets sorted. In the pandemic, their website said the drop-in clinic was closed, but when I tried to phone, I kept getting a message 'no one available to answer your call'. There were also problems with their website.
Finally I got hold of someone on the phone and booked an appointment, only to get ill and have to cancel. It's taken months to get another appointment, this time by email. I explicitly requested an afternoon appointment, saying I'd got a sleep disorder, but was given a morning one.
I turned up to find that the bloke said things that showed that like some of his colleagues, he's rather more clueless than he should be about some things, and then found I have to get a fresh referral from my GP to somewhere else to get my hearing aids re-tuned or replaced. Their website could have said they no longer provided that service, or they could have said when I booked the appointment.
I tried to mention else-site stuff about hearing aids people don't understand (including some audiologists) and certain people were a bit scathing, but the posters in question aren't nasty people, they're kind people. I said that what's frustrating is they only test 6-8 pitches using louder and louder beeps, but what do they do with the pitches in-between? I've had a whole series of hearing aids that do different things with them, amplifying some pitches and blocking out others, which is something understood by quite a few deafies I've chatted with online, so why don't audiologists get it?
Someone hairsplit between pitch and frequency and I said maybe I've got the wrong jargon, but the point is that it's only a few sounds that are musically higher or lower that are tested.
Someone else said I didn't understand stuff to do with what the computers do and I'm afraid I got growly. If two people have those six or eight pitches/frequencies/notes or whatever tested beep, beep, press button, and have identical charts, how does a computer algorithm know which has got more hearing loss in-between the ones it tests, and which has less? For instance, if some of the deafness is industrial injury, the computer doesn't know how high/low the loud noise that caused the injury or damage was.
Someone else was also saying about ability to hear speech being tested and I said my hospital has never done that with me. It pressed horrible buttons for me because I have a sense going right back to childhood that it's an everyday thing that other people think they know my personal experiences better than I do. Gosh, how could I possibly know my hearing aids make it harder to make out what people are saying, not easier? How could I possibly know what does or doesn't happen when I personally attend a hospital appointment?
Maybe my fresh referral will be to a clinic/practice that is more competent, but I find it heartbreaking that my local audiology clinic has, over the years, been so rubbish (with some notable exceptions) and more to the point, that so many people don't realise what rubbish service some of us have to put up with.
Yet there is so much kindness out there (including from people I may be frustrated by) and I'm still somehow here, still holding on and slowly moving forward.
