Here I am, nearly eight years post-TBI. I’m still alive.

There are still two long-lived (heh) symptoms related to the TBI that I still struggle with regularly.

One of them is visual. Corrective lenses help to a point. And it’s exacerbated by simply aging — yay, presbyopia! I can cope with it to a degree.

But the other is just frustrating and leaves me feeling isolated from the world around me and yet bombarded by sounds. All sounds.

Let me explain.

After my TBI, I’ve come to describe my auditory system works more like a damaged signal-processing pipeline than a damaged microphone. The hardware (ears, cochleas, nerves) is intact, but the software stack that filters, routes, and prioritizes sound took a hit.

Normally the brain runs an automatic ‘noise gate’ of sorts that suppresses irrelevant audio, boosts meaningful signals (like speech), and manages bandwidth. Mine doesn’t always do that reliably. Under certain conditions—especially in noisy environments, multitasking, stress, or fast speech—the gating process struggles.

And when gating struggles:

• Background noise and foreground speech come in at equal priority. I’m overwhelmed with “noise”.
• I may hear a sound but not decode it. This one is difficult to put into words as human cognition is complex.
• Some voices break through (especially familiar ones), yet others drop out.
• Complex or rapid speech becomes garbled or unintelligible.
• The whole system can overload and temporarily stop parsing input correctly.
• It’s not hearing loss; it’s processing loss.

I do better with: slower speech, with one speaker at a time, quieter environments, visual cues, and a little extra processing time. Sometimes I’ll interrupt and ask, “Hold on a moment please while my brain processes this…”

Sometimes, it’s not possible nor realistic to ask for a moment to absorb or comprehend, yet I do my best to muddle through.