One theme from my baptism testimony was how God was always orchestrating things according to His way, and how I have always been caught up by His plans in general without my interfering.
Today is something of that example.
I finally received notice from MOH in the morning that I am now eligible for the booster vaccine, and so I quickly went online to sort out the appointment date. Considering that I would be starting work on Monday, it was important that I do not start it while under the side effects of the booster. I had been on Comirnarty earlier for the original shots, and naturally I was going for the Spikevax (Moderna COVID-19) one instead. The unfortunate thing was that the number of vaccination centres in SIN city that provided Spikevax had been greatly reduced, and more importantly, most had their earliest available time slots being set on Thursday. That is a little too late for my liking, and it was a showdown between Buona Vista CC, and Hong Kah North CC. Of these two, I was most familiar with the location of Buona Vista CC, and so I grabbed the earliest slot that they had, which was tomorrow first thing in the morning.
Subsequently, I received notice from my audiologist's secretary that my earplugs were ready, with a request for a convenient time for me to show up and test them out. By that time, it was past one, and had this come earlier, I would have set the appointment to Tuesday instead. But I already had it marked down for the booster shot---I was not going to risk running about with potential side effects to test out something that required my fullest attention to learn how to use effectively. And so I suggested some time today, before the meet up with the care group's dinner.
The timing worked out well, and I went down to have it tested, only for us to realise that our worst fears on how the sharp angle on my ear canal made the insertion of the ear plug exceedingly difficult. And so it would be another week before a modified version would be ready for trying. I had also taken the opportunity to take the complimentary hearing test, and it turned out that I was not as deaf as I thought I was. There was some discrepancy for my hearing between my two ears across the tested frequencies of 125 Hz to 8 kHz in octave bands, with my left ear being less sensitive to the lower frequencies while my right ear was less sensitive for the higher frequencies. A bone conduction test was done and it was verified that there was nothing wrong with my hearing nerve, and a further test confirmed that my ear drum was not as flexible as it should. All in all, my overall hearing sensitivity spanned between 15 dB HL to 30 dB HL, which translates to the qualitative assessment of mild hearing loss, which leads to minor confusion of sounds. Any further assessment would likely involve the ENT, though to be fair, most of my hearing was within the normal hearing range on average.
There was no dip near the 4 kHz frequency, a usual indicator for noise-related hearing damage. Neither was there any noticeable drop logarithmically as the frequencies in the high range increased from 1.5 kHz to 8 kHz---this means that age-related hearing loss was not present.
So I am satisfied with my hearing, and now know how best to mitigate the types of sounds that I want to hear most clearly.
Relating back to how God's plans work out, it's a good thing in many ways that I could get all these important things sorted out before I started work. I am glad that it has turned out the way it has.
Fellowship dinner with the care group was heartening, as always. The food was good, and the company was great. The weather was trolling, but that was to be expected considering that the place where we were meeting to eat was near the coastal regions of SIN city after all.
And with that is the entry for today. Till the next update.
No comments:
Post a Comment