For as long as I can remember I've had great difficulty hearing in noisy environments. In my younger years it didn't bother me too much as I was mostly at noisy events to enjoy the music anywhere, and if I wanted to talk we'd move somewhere quieter. If I make a concerted effort I can usually hear someone directly opposite me fine, though in an especially noisy venue like a concert I'm often filling in the blanks with lip reading or other visual cues. If I'm standing by something noisy in the house (range, operating vacuum cleaner, etc.) I can often tell someone is talking to me but usually have no idea what they are saying. All this has been on the "minor inconvenience" end of a personal impact spectrum. Recently I had a minor traffic accident (reversed into a car at very low speed, little damage and no injuries) and I realised that in that moment I had such little awareness of what was around me that it I was concerned. There was a lot of very loud conversation happening around me at the time. No screaming or anything, and I wasn't part of the conversation, but it was enough to completely destroy my focus at the time. I'd had a similar incident a couple of years prior. All this meant I decided I should book in to have my hearing checked.
Fast forward to the results: she said the tympanogram results show a highly compliant middle ear, but far more aggressively responsive than she'd seen before. Usually you'd see little or slow response if there was a problem but I'm the complete opposite of that. For the audiogram results I can hear into negative decibels but with a large enough delta in the results between left and right ear that I'll need to do some follow-up scans. She also ran two separate types of test to check for Auditory Processing Disorder.
Everything game back within range, or at least on the opposite side of what you'd call hearing "loss". Which prompted her to mention "but, at conferences lately they have been talking about a phenomenon that is presenting more frequently and being referred to as 'hidden hearing loss'...". So I've been down a rabbit hole of reading for the past week trying to filter out the things that a pure woo to the stuff that looks like it has some rigour to it. Seems like there's also been a trend for people to label some of these symptoms as "pub deaf".
I'm curious if any others on HN have had similar experiences and/or been down this research path before.