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One day, Steve woke up and the world had gone silent. His alarm didn’t blare, the birds didn’t chirp, the pitter-patter of the rain didn’t lull him back to sleep the way it usually did on those gloomy kind of mornings. He’d gone eighteen years being able to hear - though not as clearly as he should, thanks to his progressive ear condition - and then, like a candle flame, that ability had been completely snuffed out.The doctor had warned him before that this could happen, that one more major head injury could wipe out what hearing he had left. Steve hadn’t thought that slamming his head on the corner of an open cabinet would have done it, because that would have been, like, karmically bad luck, right? And so he’d iced his skull and went to sleep. When he opened his eyes again, everything was different.Steve’s first instinct was to panic, because what the hell was he supposed to do without his hearing? He didn’t know sign language. Didn’t even know anyone who used sign language. But after slowly coming to the conclusion that freaking out wasn’t going to get him anywhere, he thought of a better solution: Dustin. Dustin had been his ears at his previous appointments, and with more than a little enthusiasm; the little twerp would know exactly what to do.“You have to see your ENT doc!” Dustin had insisted, and Steve didn’t need to hear his voice to understand how concerned he was. It turned out the staff at the doctor’s office was, too, because they’d squeezed him in for an appointment for what they called “sudden hearing loss” that very afternoon.Though he felt a little embarrassed schlepping a kid along to his doctor’s appointment, his parents were gone and Steve was too anxious and worried to go alone. The ear specialist had prescribed him a course of steroids to hopefully restore some of his hearing, and then sent him right over to the audiologist for a hearing test.Steve hated this part, sitting in the cramped booth waiting for the sounds to come. The little beeps were whisper-quiet, so soft that he could have been hallucinating them. But just like he was told, Steve pushed the button and said the words, and hoped like hell he didn’t do as badly as he thought.“Here are your previous results,” the audiologist said, “and here are today’s.”She slid a second piece of paper out from beneath the first and held it out. Steve glanced at the graph in front of him, which showed all the exes and ohs representing his responses near the very bottom. His stomach flipped. He wasn’t the smartest guy, but even he knew that when it came to most things in life, being at the bottom was rarely a positive.“Your hearing has decreased significantly in both ears from last year,” the audiologist confirmed with sympathy in her eyes.Steve’s eyes flicked up. He watched her mouth as she spoke.“It’s now considered severe to profound, which means all of those speech sounds that you need to hear clearly? You aren’t hearing them at all anymore, not unless things are really, really loud. Take the steroids as prescribed and we’ll retest in two weeks, okay?”
Severe to profound.
Steve processed the words in his head. He knew his hearing wasn’t great before, but this sounded bad. Real-deal, no-holds-barred bad.“Steve?”Both Dustin and the audiologist were looking at him expectantly.He nodded and forced a thin-lipped smile, but what he really wanted to do was break down and cry.Steve lived the next two weeks in total silence. It was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. Sure, he’d had some degree of hearing loss for a while now, but now it was like the lights were turned off. No one was home. Though his parents were finally back from their trip and Dustin was checking in on him like a mother hen, it was like Steve was trapped in his own little bubble, his head packed full of cotton.He never felt so alone.Steve sat on the edge of his bed, staring down at the foil packet of steroid tablets in his hand. There was just one left. There hadn’t been any noticeable improvement in his hearing so far; he was just as deaf now as he’d been when he started them. Hurray for him.He imagined the crinkly sound the wrapper made as he popped the last pill out of its package. Though he swallowed it down like the instructions said, Steve knew deep down that it was a lost cause.It wasn’t a surprise to him when the follow-up test showed no change, and it really wasn’t a surprise when the audiologist recommended hearing aids. Again. But that was easy for her to say because she wasn’t the one who would have to wear them, those giant hunks of plastic that curled over the top of the ears like jumbo shrimp. Just the thought made Steve nauseous.“You read to,” Dustin said as they drove home from his follow-up appointment.Steve scrunched his face. “What? What the hell does reading have to do with any of this?”It was when Dustin softened with pity that Steve realized he’d misheard.“I said, you need to, Steve. Get hearing aids.”Steve’s eyes darted to his lips as he tried to piece together what Dustin was saying. It was like he was listening underwater, only a hundred times more difficult.“You’re missing so much,” Dustin continued. “And you didn’t say more than ten words at the basketball game the other day.”“So? I was watching the action.”“Bullshit. You weren’t able to swallow anything.”Swallow? Steve frowned. That wasn’t right. But he wasn’t going to let on that he fucked up again. Even if it was just Dustin he was talking to, it was still really freaking embarrassing.Dustin must have read his mind, because he raised his voice again. “Follow. You weren’t following the conversation.”“Oh,” Steve muttered, ears burning.“Look, you aren’t acting like yourself at all. Hearing aids would, you know, get you back in the middle of things.” Dustin held up the shiny new hearing aid pamphlet for emphasis. “The doctor told you that last time.”Steve rolled his eyes. As if it were that easy. Last time, he still had some semblance of hearing. Last time, the audiologist hadn’t uttered the word profound. He’d been able to get by fairly well before, but now… Now, Steve didn’t know what the hell to do.He thought back to the other day, where, sandwiched between Dustin and some band geek, he’d pretended to engage in the conversation as Hawkins High got stomped by their rival
basketball team. The truth was that he hadn’t heard jack shit the whole night; he’d only felt the bass of the footsteps on the stands, the dull roar of the crowd.Dustin was right. He was missing out.A heavy sigh escaped him as the options were laid out: he could either live a life in silence or try to take back some control. Steve wasn’t the type to sit on his ass and take other people’s shit. Why should he take it from his own body?“Fine,” Steve relented. “I’ll try them. But if they suck, I’m returning them.”To his surprise, he was able to pick out hearing aids that matched his hair color, instead of the bandaid beige that Pops sported. Next, the audiologist took impressions of his ears with pink goop (“For ear molds,” she’d explained, “so we can keep the sound in your ears.”). Though Dustin had pestered him to get fun colors for the molds, Steve chose a more discrete clear.It took two long weeks to get his new hearing aids, and in that time he’d almost canceled the appointment. But his parents forced him to go, which was the most vocal they’d been about anything in his life - probably because they were sick of shouting at him. But just like all the other appointments, it hadn’t been Steve’s mom or dad to accompany him; it was Dustin, who’d equipped himself with his trusty pen and notebook. It was also Dustin whose voice Steve heard for the first time since he lost his hearing.The audiologist made sure everything fit okay, and then used a little screwdriver to adjust the settings on the hearing aids. Then, she nodded to Dustin, who pulled something out from his backpack.Tears sprang to Steve’s eyes as he listened to Dustin read a passage from his favorite book. He was blown away by how clear each word was, their edges razor-sharp. He could hear each and every sound as crisp as a new dollar bill. Steve couldn’t ever remember hearing that well, not even when he was in elementary school.Closing his book, Dustin raised his head, lips tugging into a hopeful smile. “How did that sound?”Steve dragged his sleeve across his face with a sniffle. “It sounded great. Really, really great.”When they walked out of the audiologist’s office, Steve was shocked by how loud everything was. He could hear the kids screaming like maniacs on the adjacent playground. The traffic noise as cars zipped by. And the freakin’ car signal! Steve had no clue it even made a sound. That was the moment he realized just how significantly his hearing loss had been affecting him.All this time, he’d thought that hearing aids would change everything for the worse. That wearing them would mean he wasn’t Steve Harrington anymore. The hearing aids, they did change things in a way, Steve realized, as he listened to Dustin’s mile-a-minute chattering.They gave him his life back.