Audio Processing Problems and Info Retention Problems

[Carrigon]

I went out with a friend tonight. And it was my job to cut out the coupons. Somehow, I cut out the wrong one, even though I was sure I read it right. Didn't find out till we got up to the cashier, too. This cannot be chalked up to just a mistake because I had severe audio processing problems at the restaurant. The cashier sounded like she was speaking a foreign language, and when she asked me a question, I didn't know what she was asking me. And then when they put my stuff on the tray, the guy, who was a different person than the cashier, asked me something and he, too, sounded like he was speaking a foreign language. Always a joy to find out you are worse than you think you are. When I get days like this, I really see how severely impaired I am. I am not well enough to function in the real world. I can't do it. Simply not well enough. And there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it. I have real neurological damage from this disease.

 

[Ocean]

I have this problem too. Actually I've had problems with taking in auditory info since childhood, since long before I became very sick. It's one reason I hate talking on the phone. I always attributed it to ADHD. But so many of those symptoms could pass for cognitive CFS symptoms too so it's very hard for me to differentiate. I try to stick with written info as much as possible. And voices are much better if a face goes with them. Radio, books on tape, phone etc. have always been a real challenge for me. I guess since I had this my whole life, I've just accepted it part of me, but there is a chance it's worsened since I've been sick but it's hard to really tell since I've had this trait for so long. I know it's definitely worse for me on certain medications.

 

[Ocean]

And by the way Carrigon, I'm sorry you're having this problem. I know how hard it can be especially if others don't understand. For me I think a lot of people I know can't understand my aversion to talking on the phone and it's limited my contact with a lot of people, especially those who don't use email much for one reason or another.

 

[Carrigon]

I only talk on the phone when I have to, too. And people are still mad at me to this day that I don't use the phone much. They don't understand that I can't. I'm just not well enough for it. Between the sound sensitivity with a voice at your ear, and trying to concentrate on what they are saying to you, it just doesn't work for me. I can't even do chat on the pc much because it's too draining. I'm better with forums or PM's. Email, I'm okay. But real life and phones, no.

 

[maddietod]

I only talk on the phone with people I know really well, like my mom. Even there, I only call her when I'm feeling relatively well.

My new neighbor called yesterday. I recognized his voice, but it sounded like he was gargling rocks. I've had a cold all week, so I blamed it on my stuffed up ears. Which didn't help, but I knew better.

 

[taniaaust1]

he, too, sounded like he was speaking a foreign language.

I used to get that happening to me a lot and it truely is like they are speaking another lauguage. When Ive been like that even if they speak slower or repeat what they've said over and over, it still often didnt help as I couldnt understand the speech itself.

And there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it. I have real neurological damage from this disease. .

Thankfully I dont think thou most of that damage which is obviously happening to our brains is permanent.

I havent had an incident of not able to understand language at all for ages now, and it used to happen to me all the time. (my children had to learn to communicate with me using only one or two words and sign to me eg point to objects when asking me something, when I was at my worst).

I ended up being diagnosed with central auditory processing disorder (CAPD). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
.........

OHHH.. I just remembered ..funny what I block out, I seem to be constantly trying to block out he hassels I have and my symptoms and always trying to think Im better then I are... anyway I ARE much better then I used to be.

I did have an incident of it at the supermarket several weeks back.. the cashier was asking me something to do with my bankcard but I couldnt understand. He asked me 3 times and all I could do is dumbly stare at him cause I'd lost ability to comprehend cause I'd worn myself out with doing the shopping.. in the end I just replied "yes" as he was awaiting and pushing for a response and wouldnt give up but I didnt even know what I was replying to, so just hoped I'd given the right response to whatever his question was. (I still dont know what he asked me).

One just has to wing ones way out of things and hope one has responded right and then just go along with whatever the other person does. (is amazing just how much we can cover up our issues and appear to get by with things by doing so).

 

[Ocean]

I only talk on the phone when I have to, too. And people are still mad at me to this day that I don't use the phone much. They don't understand that I can't. I'm just not well enough for it. Between the sound sensitivity with a voice at your ear, and trying to concentrate on what they are saying to you, it just doesn't work for me. I can't even do chat on the pc much because it's too draining. I'm better with forums or PM's. Email, I'm okay. But real life and phones, no.

Me too Carrigon!

 

[Carrigon]

I've now had two days of payback from this little outting. Severe pain, fatigue, and today I had a bloody nose. It wasn't worth the hell (((((((((( But I go because I feel, when am I going to get to go. She's my only real local friend. I hope I'll be okay for the Thanksgiving and Xmas outtings.

 

[alex3619]

Hi Carrigon, I have had this problem transiently. Once I boarded a bus but I could not understand the driver. He had a very very slight accent, mild enough that I could normally understand him. He thought I was deaf and started shouting, but the clear diction from the shouting I was finally able to understand - not because of volume.

I get an allied problem sometimes though - I sometimes don't know what I am looking at. I couldn't work out how to use webpages or facebook the other day - to do things I have done many times. Sometimes I have seen things that are not there - a shrink would call that visual hallucination, but its really a recognition problem. My brain is reaching around for something I see and I make a wrong interpretation. Its really there, its just something else. When I am really tired I cant read - its just squiggle squiggle squiggle, very frustrating.

I got myself a twenty-seven inch monitor, which requires a good graphics card, and I have the webpage zoom cranked up. It makes reading much easier.

I think these problems are not permanent for the most part. I have had more than a few very brief remissions of neurocognitive symptoms over the years, usually only for a few hours. This strongly indicates that for me at least these are functional problems, not structural, which means once we can get good treatment it should be reversible.

I have friends who usually invite me over for xmas and New Years. I have always paid for it. I am considering not going this year - you are not alone in having to make these choices.

Bye
Alex

 

[Carrigon]

I have a 25 inch pc in my bedroom and I keep the fonts large. That definitely helps. My eyes won't do small fonts anymore at all. I don't know why it's still standard default to have tiny sized 8 or so fonts on alot of pc's.

What's weird with the audio processing is that I will often not have a problem with my friend talking to me. It seems to happen more when I will have a cashier ask me a question that I am not expecting. If someone just says something to me, then it hits. But if I'm expecting someone to say something, I get it a bit less. Maybe because I'm concentrating more if I'm expecting it.

 

[alex3619]

Ahh, Carrigon, something else I recognize! We do a lot of our preparative thinking before things I think, when something comes up we were not expecting its like opening the fridge and finding a fully grown pine tree in a TARDIS fridge. We just dont know how to cope. Thats ME all over. Bye, Alex

 

[maddietod]

Yes, this is me exactly. This phone call was from a new friend, who has a southern accent, and he was asking me an unexpected question. I was completely unprepared, and couldn't make heads or tails of it.

 

[Dainty]

I also experience this problem. Thankfully it's mainly a transient issue with me, but it depends a lot on the person's voice, whether or not I'm past my envelope and what else is going on in the environment. Often times I'll simply ask the person to repeat themselves, occasionally even two or three times. It is truly as if they're speaking another language. If I cannot comprehend then I excuse myself from the conversation to try some other time.

I remember the first few times it happened it was quite disturbing. Now that I know it's a recognized symptom of CAPD and that it will pass it's easier to wait it out. The main problem it causes me now is every so often I connect with someone who's every other sentence is garbled in my brain no matter how rested I am. It rules out audio conversations, which is disappointing to me but I'm thankful there are other options for communication.

 

[Carrigon]

It's now Thursday and I am still severely flared up since going out on Sunday. This is just unreal. I think it's the food. I can't eat the microwaved crap anymore and they gave me a soda with the deal that was probably loaded with aspartame. I didn't even finish it and I'm sick as a dog. I did finish the dessert thing that was also probably loaded with aspartame. And now I'm deathly ill and can't do anything, all week. Totally sux.

 

[August59]

I'm about 70% deaf in my right ear and now my left ear is starting to go. The weird part about my left ear status is that I can hear most of the normal voice range, but I can't hear certain parts unless they are talking pretty loud and there is not a lot of background noise. I can't hear real low "o" sounds or real high "e" sounds as if there is just skips in their words. I can't understand a lot of people talking to me unless they are looking straight at me, so that I can sort of read their lips.

I can't have a $1 dollar bill worth of problems when I go out, but instead it is 100 pennies worth of problems in a short period of time which can start anxiety, pain and lots of other problems with me.

 

[ixchelkali]

it's really a recognition problem

Alex, I think you nailed it. It seems like that part of our brains that interprets the incoming data malfunctions. Someone I was close to developed Lewy body dementia and he had that problem. I was able to understand when it happened to him, because it happens to me. The auditory one is called receptive aphasia. Fortunately, in ME/CFS it's transient. Still disconcerting when it happens, though.

Okay, I guess this is kind of a funny/sad incident, but it was funny to me at the time: I recently had a conversation with a neighbor who had a stroke not long ago and is recovering from its effects. She suffers from verbal paraphasia, where you substitute a wrong word for the one you meant, so her speech is kind of word salad. But I'm so used to overcoming my bouts of receptive aphasia that I didn't have too much trouble understanding her; I know how to skip over the nonsense words and guess the overall meaning. We had a nice chat.

I'm working on saying "I'm sorry, but I have a neurological problem that makes sometimes makes it hard for me to understand words. Would you try that again?"

 

[pamb]

Gosh, but this sounds familiar. My husband definitely has CAPD - and now we have another name, for another thing that does not work quite right.

It comes and goes for him too and is so frustrating. It's no wonder he does not want to go out without me. We moved from France home to Canada last summer, with me hoping it would be good for him to be able to be a bit independent and simply converse with the people he meets. For the most part that is working well as he fakes it really well for casual conversation, but when I am with him I can see that he very often has no idea what is going on in a conversation.

Alex, I forgot to 'reply/quote' but I love the pine tree in the tardis concept. I can see that written all over John's face sometimes :cheeky grin I'll tell him about the pine tree and tardis, and if he remembers he can use that as code for 'get me out of here fast'.

 

[Calathea]

I've got both visual and auditory processing problems. They seem to be common with ME and also with autism spectrum disorders, judging from the people I know with ASDs.

I reckon the APD is lifelong, but it wasn't recognised until a few years ago. There's stuff on record about repeatedly testing me for deafness as a baby, and apparently I'd come home from primary school with my hands over my ears saying I couldn't stand the noise, and I've always spoken rapidly which is another sign of APD, but I have crappy parents and they decided that my hearing difficulties were a deliberate behavioural problem. I gradually learned to compensate for it in childhood, high intelligence can mask a lot of things, and was actually a keen musician. When I got ME at the age of 19 it exacerbated the APD to the point that I started to get major problems with it, which I first noticed when university lectures stopped making any sense whatsoever.

I saw a hearing therapist a few years ago, and while she was in a hospital where they hadn't heard of APD, she did have a few good ideas. I was sternly told to avoid ear plugs, they make the hyperacusis (hypersensitivity to sound) worse. It was already pretty bad from living alone (I was single then), rarely leaving the flat, and generally being used to silence. Instead, I was given a pair of in-ear white noise generators and told to wear them an increasing amount to train my brain out of the hyperacusis, plus I was to wear them for shopping centres etc. so that the noise would bother me less. It's a bit tricky if you need to have a conversation, but otherwise they were quite useful. She also gave me a bedside white noise generator (well, actually I used the rain sounds, there were several options) to use at night, which has been particularly handy when there's been noise for some reason, and you can get versions that plug in to a special pillow if you have a partner. I'm not really using any of this any more, that particular problem doesn't seem to be as bad these days. I should probably dig out the in-ear ones for hospital visits, now I think of it, as sensory overload is a big problem there.

She gave me a few tips, such as working out which ear I favour and teaching me where to sit when I was in groups (at the front, to the side which allows me to favour my good ear), but I've long since lost the bit of paper and can't remember the rest. I think it's worth researching APD and at the very least asking about on APD forums, or getting to a hearing therapist who can work with APD if that's viable.

The visual processing problems are for another thread, and another day when I'm less tired! Though can I just wish that there were more colour scheme options for this forum?

I find that sensory problems bleed into one another, and if one sense is overloaded the others get bad as well. Someone on another ME forum I know said that they find that a small dose of valium can be helpful for sensory overload. Does anyone know more about that?

 

[taniaaust1]

I recently had a conversation with a neighbor who had a stroke not long ago and is recovering from its effects. She suffers from verbal paraphasia, where you substitute a wrong word for the one you meant,

Thanks for that. I do that some times but didnt know what it was called. I not only do it at times when Im speaking but also end up having to often correct my posts over and over as I do it when typing too.

 

[maddietod]

Is this ever associated with ringing in the ears? Which I've had as far back as I can remember.