I had a major life change today.

I got my first pair of hearing aids.

Last summer I was diagnosed with moderate bilateral hearing loss and started the process of figuring out what to do about it, which first included rechecking my hearing several months after the first findings to confirm it all, and later included long waits for available appointments at the audiologist and then for insurance to approve their coverage for the devices.

But I got them fitted today.

Honestly they feel weird, sort of itchy; it will take some getting used to. I am also learning the mechanics of it all, how to turn things on and off and adjust different settings. It also does not help that I am, once again, sick, this time with another nasty sinus infection.

Still, all in all, it’s pretty cool to be able to better hear everyone and everything! Do you know what I learned today at work, after having been there for over five years?

The clock in the library makes a ticking sound.

I’d never heard it before. What a revelation!

With the incredibly virulent environment in which I grew up, poor hearing was really just as well for me I expect. Who wants to listen to all that yelling and screaming at top volume, right? Even these days, being years removed from that, I still seek out quiet sometimes to center myself when things feel too loud. Surely it’s hard to say from only one day so far, but I wonder if using these hearing aids will be as much an emotional adjustment as a physical one.

Or maybe that’s just me overthinking things again.

Passover is coming soon; I’ve been thinking about trying to find The Ten Commandments to watch, for old times’ sake, and now I’ll have better luck hearing some of that really quiet dialogue. I then remembered today that the movie opens with that pronouncement, “And G-d said, let there be light…and there was light…” Et cetera. Well, indulge me.

And G-d said, let there be sound…and there was sound! For the first time in decades!