Q: I am deaf but in one ear. I feel I’m lucky to
hear at all, but I am curious on how my condition
occurred. Either I had an infection in my ear at a young
age and the doctors were too late finding it, or I was
born this way.
A. Many people with hearing loss (one or both ears) don’t actually know the reason, including me. For all I know, all the nerve systems in my body are “going” and when the last little whisper of hearing goes (I hear a little noise, nothing useful), then my vision is next. (I’m sure it really isn’t going that way, but with no explanation, your imagination runs wild.) Could have been infection, or some really loud noise I don’t remember, an antibiotic I don’t remember taking, or perhaps a rare hereditary gene thing. Some people are lucky to know how they became deaf, but most people with progressive losses and many with medical losses have no idea why.
The bottom line, though, is: it doesn't really matter why. I wondered for years and then it hit me: it exists regardless of whether I understand it. I’m not meaning to downplay your question because it is an absolutely normal curiosity in the early stage of adjustment to deafness. There are a zillion reasons it could have happened and basically there is no way to confirm which one of those really affected you.
Your big task really is figuring out how you are going to cope with people who understand you can hear from this side but not necessarily from that side, and also to cope with the nagging inner voice you may have that says “If I don't know why this happened on the one side, how do I know it won’t happen on the other side?”
To a person with a monaural (one ear) hearing loss, the “worst imaginable thing in the world” is usually deafness in both ears. In reality, you can live with deafness. Now, to a deaf person, the worst imaginable thing is blindness, but I’m sure there is a deaf-blind person somewhere who would tell me that’s survivable too!
