Lauren Karch

So that weekend, I visited my parents.

And it's never, like, nice to start a conversation with, what if I end up like you?

But that's basically what I did to my dad.

And he told me, you know, a few things.

He was like, there's all this assistive technology and, like, supportive community for people with hearing loss.

And frankly, it's not a huge tragedy not hear everybody all the time in this economy.

My dad's a very, like, zen, very, like, believes in a higher path kind of person.

So that kind of brought me out of my basement of depression.

But a few months later, I was back at the same doctor's office because I kept getting these episodes of room-spinning vertigo, and my hearing was worse.

So they retested me, and I was up to 80 decibels of loss in my right ear, which they have the little dumb layman's term chart in the soundproof booth.

So that means that on my right side, I can hear things that are louder than, quote, a lawnmower at close range, which is awesome.

And so I went home, and I got on Reddit like you do when you're looking up rare diseases, and I found this interview with an artist who also had Meniere's disease, and the interviewer had asked him, I thought it was such a good question, what sound do you miss the most?

And he was like a poet or something, so he said, I most miss the soft sound of a cat lapping water because it sounds so satisfying for the cat.

So I found myself then,

sitting on my living room floor, sloshing a water bowl towards my increasingly disgruntled cat,

And Pterodactyl, that's my cat's name, she was not satisfied.

She just looked at me like, I don't get paid enough for this.

But the question had given me kind of an idea of something I could do to feel a little bit more in control.

I thought I should make a list of everything I want to hear before I go deaf, in case I go deaf, like a playlist bucket list, right?

Like, yeah, I probably can't afford to go to the Amazon rainforest right now, but I could leave the window open when it rains.