Save Your Hearing

I came home from Vietnam with some significant hearing loss, mainly in my right ear, the result of an M-16 on full rock-n-roll right next to my head one night when the Jeep I was riding in got ambushed.

I also love music, and I love it turned up loud. Which can create additional problems with your hearing if you've joined the iPod revolution.

While my mp3 player is not an actual iPod, it is essentially the same thing: a 1 gig mp3 player with headphones, and I have to be careful when I turn up the volume.

All of his isn't new, but it's being newly stressed in a new report from the Mayo Clinic. For all of us old geezers who already had hearing loss, the news is pretty grim. It appears to be worse if you use those tiny little "earbud" headphones jammed into your ear canal.

Take some time to read the article, and then consider what I did to deal with it.

I bought some over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones from Sony (only $125 and worth every penny; Bose, the Rolls Royce of headphones, can possibly be better, but not $150 better) which have a noise-cancelling circuit built in. Consequently I can drown out the external noise -- I work in a particularly loud office with some annoyingly irritating coworkers -- without having to crank up the volume.

Of course just not wearing them is an option, but I'm afraid that if I did that, you'd be seeing the breaking news alerts: "Vietnam vet goes beserk, film at eleven".