fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #7014 ]

⌈ Secret Post #7014 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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01. [SPOILERS for Big Mouth (kdrama)]

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02. [SPOILERS for Call the Midwife, series 15 finale]

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03. [SPOILERS for Call the Midwife]

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04. [WARNING for discussion of pedophilia]

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05. [WARNING for discussion of ableism]

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06. [WARNING for discussion of JKR/transphobia]

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07. [WARNING for discussion of transphobia, racism]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1001.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Unfortunately I can think of a reason that would explain at least some instaces of this behaviour. Uncorrected hearing loss starting in midlife beyond is thought to be a significant contributor to dementia.

So it may be that after a long period of declining hearing (and people can get surprisingly good at hiding hearing loss, for a surprisingly long time, even with cognitive decline in the mix), a parent is resisting not just due to stigma or fear, but because their ability to reason is getting worse. I've recently been in this situation with my mum, and even getting the hearing aids isn't always the solution you'd think it'd be.

Mum has congenital deafness in one ear, so her hearing aid was a familiar part of life in my childhood. Hearing aids used to be pretty basic and would amplify every sound in the vicinity, not just speech, so she'd have to turn it down or off if we were walking next to a busy road. But over the years they got more sophisticated.

Unfortunately, my mother has a fuckton of trauma which meanwhile led to involvement with faith healing in my tween/teen years (which = her late 40s). She was trying to get a miracle cure for me, and when that obvs didn't happen (I have a really gnarly autoimmune disease) she convinced herself that her deafness, which she'd never even asked the group to pray about, was improving...

So, Mum stops wearing a hearing aid for the next three decades, i.e. the period in which uncorrected hearing loss can be slowly, secretly putting its finger on the scale re: what your old age is going to be like. During the pandemic lockdowns, mental health issues she's never fully dealt with (because more generational stigma) got worse in isolation while I was barely keeping my head above water in a domestic abuse situation, and it is notable that social isolation itself is also a risk factor for dementa (n.b. that dementia is a symptom rather than a disease, but we don't have a diagnosis for Mum yet so I'm trying to avoid specifying).

Meanwhile, her older brother is finally persuaded to get the two hearing aids he's needed for ages, which inspires her to get one, which helps until she loses it... which she doesn't tell me about for six months.

By this time, it's been clear to me for a while that there's more than just mental health problems affecting her behaviour, but she won't hear of it. After months of gentle nagging (after coming out of a coercive control situation, there is a very real fear attached to coercing your own parent, so I'm hands-off where I ought to wade in - I'm also dealing with serious mental health and housing issues myself at this point), I only manage to get her to get hearing aids by booking the appointment myself.

At her assessment, it turns out that in the "bad" ear she's lost most of what little hearing remained, and in the "good" ear she's lost 40% of her hearing in the three years since her last test. The hearing loss has been masked by the cognitive decline, because the latter, being newer, has been the most alarming thing to me, and now she struggles to cope with the hearing aids themselves. It's only due to an unrelated hospitalisation that she's now on the waiting list for the older persons' psychiatric team, who should be able to get her on the pathway for cognitive assessment.

I am not trying to be alarmist or to say hidden dementia is always the reason, or that every situation will play out like this. But my uncle ended up with a dementia diagnosis only a few years after getting his hearing aids, and given what my cousins have said about how long they felt he needed hearing aids, my sense is that there can come a point where the effects of deafness and cognitive decline combined can be experienced by their adult child as "why has my parent become so incredibly unreasonable/irrational?" and the cognitive decline hides under the deafness - or, as in my mum's case, vice versa. It's deeply unfortunate that my own life was being put through the blender at the same time or maybe I could've handled it better.

[ SECRET POST #7014 ]

Re: Aging parents.