Winter Perils

Winter brings a plague of dry skin. I have a nasty habit of unconsciously itching my legs. Often until they bleed. This itch is visited 1000-fold in my ears. Because of my moldings, there’s something rubbing up against them already irritating them. So the normal itchiness, the mundane discomfort, grows up from a little beast into a giant foaming-at-the-mouth Yeti. 

I find myself constantly, and unconsciously, adjusting my moldings. I fiddle with the molding, repositioning it and in so doing, giving the ear canal a little scritchy-scratch. But in doing that, the bionic ear itself is repositioned and is sitting on the back of my ear like a drunken sailor. I have to shift that back into a more comfortable resting position, which shifts the tubing slightly, which pinches it slightly, which muffles the sound slightly, which causes me to adjust the molding slightly. Needless to say (though I’ll say it anyway) it’s slightly a witch to scratch the itch.  

That’s the run-of-the-mill winter day. On those run-of-the-errands winter day, I have another thing going on with my ears. Or on my head to be precise. 

A winter hat. 

Since I run hot, I rarely wear hats in the summer. When I do, it’s a scally or baseball. But in winter I always wear a hat. I usually continue to wear the scally or baseball. If there is inclement weather, or it’s as cold as a polar bear’s butt, I’ll put on a winter hat. 

When I put the hat on it sits tightly around my ears. (It’d be pretty useless if it were loose.) But in being tight, it’s pressing up against my bionic ears’ mics and causing feedback. It’s also shoving my moldings deeper into my ear. Not a pleasant feeling. All of my coats have hoods. So I do have the option of ditching the hat and wearing the hood. Which I do sometimes. At those times, In the stead of feedback from the tightly fit hat, I have the scraping of a loosely fit hood. As I walk and jostle the hood, it pays it forward and jostles the bionic ears. So sometimes I ditch the hood, too. (Only if it’s not snowing or, more recently, raining.) But then poor circulation comes into play. After not long at all, my biological ears get cold. Sometimes painfully so. Truth be told, I also worry about my bionic ears. The electronic bits don’t play nice with the cold. 

So what’s a boy to do?

All of the above. Most of the time, I waffle (mmm…waffles) between the hood and the cold. I usually start my adventure with a naked head. When my ears pass the painful line, I’ll put up my hood. And I’ll listen to the symphony of scritches and scratches for as long as I’m able. Then I’ll take my hood down. And keep it down for as long as I’m able. The only playing in the snow I do these days is hiking. And the extra effort it takes to hike in the snow, with or without snowshoes, gets my blood going. Since I run hot anyway, usually I work up a sweat pretty quickly, making it too hot for hat or hood. 

But there is one activity I always wear BOTH hat and hood: shovelling.  

Talk about working up a sweat! I’ll blog about summer, when breathing makes me work up a sweat, later. I’m always concerned with sweat because sweat is water. And water does bad things to bionic ears. As Julie and Venus found out at the second BC football game we went to, heat radiates off me. I shudder to think what this radiating does to the soft plastic tubing connecting my moldings to my aids. This plastic expands with the heat and contracts with the cold. It needs to be malleable for better sound quality. Over time, these changes in temperature cause the plastic to harden. When it gets too hard, sounds makes like bumper cars and bounce off the sides of the tubing, causing the sound to be much softer when it finally reaches my poor little biological ears. I need to change my tubing every 6 months or so. And when I’m out shoveling, steam can literally be seen rising off me. This has made me wonder, why am I wearing my bionic ears? Fast on the heels of that thought comes all those stories of some poor dude getting hit by a plow while shoveling. Ah, I think to myself, that’s why.    

No matter what type of winter day it is, when I take my bionic ears out at night I sigh in relief. The blessed relief of not having anything in there after a day of itching, pressing, shifting is divine. 

Winter with my aids:
Trials AND tribulations.
Forever shifting.


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