Chapter Text
Uraraka flipped idly through the sheaf of worksheets she’d been handed in Homeroom two days before. The packet was filled with basic health information—except it didn’t just outline the basics of what people needed to stay healthy. It did that, for sure, but it also gave an overview of the types of health and wellness checks that heroes were required to take on a regular basis. From bloodwork and brain scans to quirk checkups and physicals to hearing and vision tests, heroes were required to get the types of checkups on a yearly or bi-yearly basis that most people only really bothered with once every decade or so (unless they had a preexisting condition that required them to get checked out more often, of course).
It was a little overwhelming, to be honest. Especially given that the students had to go through all of these tests over the course of the entire year, both to walk them through the process and to establish their current health baselines so that they would know if something had changed when they were tested in the future.
She was just glad that the school was personally paying for all of this; she didn’t know what she would have done if her parents had been required to pay for so many medical examinations out of pocket. That was one of the biggest reasons why she had chosen UA as her desired hero school; when there were classes that required some kind of expense, the school had enough funding to take care of it themselves. This wasn’t always the case with other schools of heroics, even the ones with good reputations, and she was grateful to have made it into a school that did.
She paused on a page detailing the recommended medical checks after being struck by electricity and other elemental quirks.
There sure were a lot of “invisible hazards” (as the packet called them) to watch out for in hero work. She flipped to the page that talked about the cautionary measures to be taken when working in an environment with high toxicity. It seemed like that would be especially important for her, as a rescue hero. She settled in to go over the process in her head and see whether she could remember the precautions checklist without looking. Let’s see, there was washing off immediately afterwards, checking in with the medical examiner present on-site, protective clothing for working around particularly hazardous materials—
“—raraka-san. Uraraka-san?”
Sato poked her gently on the arm. “Hey.” He nodded towards the front of the room.
She blinked, then the past few seconds caught up with her and she glanced at the doorway where a woman stood looking around the classroom with a clipboard.
“Oh, that’s me, haha! Sorry about that.” Uraraka stood up and grabbed her worksheets, her student ID, her phone, and a pencil, leaving everything else behind. It would all just be extra weight to carry during the tests, anyway. “Let’s go!” She shot the woman a grin as she marched out the door—perhaps a little bigger than the situation strictly called for. The woman gave her a small, polite smile in return, and gestured down the hallway. “This way, please.”
Although some types of examinations required more time and preparation (or occasionally a change in location) and needed to be scheduled separately, there was a set of basic checkups that could be completed in bulk on campus during the school day, completing several students a day over the course of a couple of weeks. An eye exam, a psych evaluation, a hearing test, and a physical.
It wouldn’t have been all that strange—not so different from the screenings they did back in elementary school, really—had it not been for the specification that each of these tests would be conducted by a professional, as if the student had scheduled an appointment with their office, and would be a complete examination rather than just a brief check-in.
It was a little more nerve-wracking than going through a screening, knowing you were going to find out exactly what your results would be. However, it was kind of exciting too, and that was the feeling she tried to hold onto as she stepped into the room for her first appointment, taking a deep breath and letting it out.
Showtime.
Two hours, a psychiatric evaluation, and a physical later, she was feeling pretty good about herself. She had worried a bit about the psych test, but it had gone just fine (not that she thought she was crazy or anything, but it wasn’t something she’d ever done before…though admittedly, that was the point of all this, making sure they knew what to expect from these types of appointments). Uraraka already knew her eyes were alright; she had actually gone through a full eye test a couple months before applying to UA, and she hadn’t noticed anything different since then. She just had to get through these next two appointments, and she’d be free to go join her friends for the afternoon practical.
After checking herself in to the secretary at the desk in the makeshift office that had been set up for the hearing test, she settled in to wait for her turn—although the students of UA were the only ones coming in, some of the appointments ran longer than others, and she appeared to be a little early anyway. She was just beginning to eye the gardening magazine that had been left on the coffee table (they’d really gone Plus Ultra on making a true miniature doctor’s office setting) when a man dressed in office-casual attire stepped through the door on the side, holding it open for a Class 2-B student as they exchanged final parting pleasantries. (Nedzu thought he was funny, sending the students in English-based reverse alphabetical order; it was why Uraraka was up already when it was only the first day of the tests)
The second-year student was sent off with a cheerful goodbye and a wave, and the man turned to Uraraka. “Are you Uraraka-san?”
She nodded.
”It’s good to meet you, Uraraka-san. My name is Kawamura. I’m a professional audiologist, and I’ll be working with you today. Come on through and we’ll get started.”
She nodded again, suddenly shy. The…—doctor? nurse? what was an audiologist exactly?—paid her reticence no mind as he ushered her to a small examination room in the back, with a couple of chairs and a table, and some strange equipment set up against the wall. She sat in one of the chairs, and Kawamura sat in the other, then turned to face her directly.
”Now, before we start, have you ever had your ears checked before?”
She blinked. “Well, we had a hearing screening at my school when I was ten, but I’ve never gone to a doctor’s office for anything like that, no.”
He nodded. “And does your family have any history of hearing problems? Anyone in your family who wears hearing aids?”
“Well my grandma has some trouble hearing sometimes, but she doesn’t have hearing aids or anything. I can’t think of anybody else.”
”Okay. Now, since you’ve never done this before, I’ll give you an overview of what this test is going to entail. This is as much a school assignment as it is an ear checkup, and knowing your teachers, they just might ask you what the different parts of the test were for.”
She nodded. This was what the worksheet was for, after all. “Alright.” She grabbed her pencil, ready to take notes.
He settled forward in his chair. “First, I’m going to take a look in your ear canals, to make sure there’s no earwax or anything obstructing your eardrums. If there is earwax, then I’ll clean out your ears before we move on to the other parts of the test.”
She wrinkled her nose. Ew. She was glad she hadn’t picked a medical profession as her career of choice.
”Next, I’ll be looking at your eardrums and inside your ears themselves, to check for any abnormalities that could be causing you problems, or might cause problems in the future. After that, I’ll be sticking this,” he held up a little white wand-like thing, “in your ear, and you’ll feel a little bit of pressure. That’s because I’m testing the elasticity of your eardrums, to see whether they’re moving like they should. Everything making sense so far?”
She nodded. “It sounds kind of like an eye exam, just for the ears instead.”
He smiled. “I suppose they are a little similar. They’re both sensory organs, after all, and the primary goal is to make sure everything is working like it’s supposed to be. That includes doing strange things like looking inside the organ itself and checking that all the parts are in the right places.”
She grinned, pleased to have gotten something right. “So, what’s after the little pressure thingy?”
”Well, first we’ll check your hearing thresholds, by playing some beeps into your ears through a set of specially calibrated headphones, and then I’ll test your word processing skills.”
She frowned. “Word processing skills?”
”How well your brain can process the sounds it’s receiving from your ears. There’s some people out there with perfect hearing according to their tests, who still can’t understand conversations because their brains aren’t able to interpret the sounds into proper words. There’s also people with fairly bad hearing, who can still understand quite a bit of conversation even without the use of hearing aids, because their brains are good at processing the sounds that they can hear.”
”Oh.” She tilted her head. “Huh. I never thought about that before.”
“Anyway, I’ll go over any other information as we go, but we should get started. Do you have any questions before we begin?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
”Alright.” He stood, and made his way to the set of medical instruments off to the side. True to his word, Kawamura looked into her ears, took a moment to clean one of them out, and then stared into her ear canals with a flashlight, muttering softly to himself.
It was supremely awkward. But the pressure wand thing wasn’t so bad, and thankfully the whole thing was over pretty quickly. After a few moments spent cleaning his equipment, Kawamura turned back and gave her a smile. “Everything looks good there, no problems with your outer ear and I don’t see anything unusual past the eardrum. Now, for the next part of the examination, I’ll need you to leave your things on the table and step into this little room over here.” He opened a door at the back of the room, gesturing her through it and into a little alcove with two tiny rooms set up with a windowed wall between them. “You sit in the chair through there, and I’ll get you settled for the hearing test. I’ll be back here for most of it, but I’ll be popping in and out to change the equipment as needed, okay?”
”Okay.” She settled down in the chair. It was more comfortable than she was expecting from the look of it, though it was still a medical chair and as such, it couldn’t be too comfortable. Kawamura puttered around in the little window office, messing with a few things, then came into the room and picked up a pair of bulky headphones with red on one side and blue on the other.
”I’m just gonna place this over your ears. I’ll be speaking to you from the other room through a microphone, so you just sit here and relax, and I’ll give you instructions here shortly.” The headphones were slipped deftly over her head and settled into place. Once he was sure they were secure, Kawamura grabbed a small device that looked kind of like a clicker you might see on a trivia show. Handing this to Uraraka with the instruction to hold onto it, he stepped back into the other room, and a moment later Uraraka heard his voice in the headphone speakers. “Can you hear me alright? Give me a nod if you can understand me.”
She nodded at him through the window.
”Good. Now, I’m going to be playing a series of tones, and you need to use the button on the clicker to tell me if you heard it or not. We’ll be going down to the very quietest sounds you can hear, so press it even if you’re not completely sure you heard something. Got it?”
She nodded again.
”Good. Here we go.” The speaker-sound turned off, and everything was silent for the first few seconds, before suddenly in her right ear—
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Caught off guard, she quickly scrambled to click the button before he could think she hadn’t heard anything, then took a deep breath and settled in to focus as the headphones beeped again, a little quieter this time.
The next few minutes were interesting, but nerve-wracking. Uraraka tried her best, but she couldn’t help but wonder if she was somehow doing it wrong. It seemed like some of the beeps ought to be taking longer to peter out into silence, or like she should be able to know for sure whether she heard something or not; her ears had a tendency to ring a little bit when it got too quiet, and that didn’t help her certainty either. After a series of about ten different notes, the headphones switched ears and they did it all over again. She watched the audiologist through the window, trying to read his face to find out how she was doing, but his expression was eerily blank. She couldn’t tell whether she was doing well or not.
After the second series of beeps was finished, Kawamura picked up his clipboard and made a few notes on it, then adjusted something in his equipment and stood to reenter the sound room. “Alright, we’re done with that part; now I’d like to run some bone conduction tests.” He gently removed the headphones from her head and placed them back on the rack, reaching for another headset that looked much more strange and unfamiliar. She eyed it warily. “Bone conduction?”
”Yes. You remember the different sections of the ear?”
”Inner ear, middle ear, and outer ear?”
”Exactly. The outer and middle ear catch the sound and send it to the inner ear, but you can send sound directly into your cochlea through the bones surrounding your ear as well. When we’re testing someone’s hearing, sometimes we’ll use this as a way to make sure that there’s no issues with the cochlea itself. This,” he pointed to the side of the headset that was especially funny looking, “goes just behind your ear, and we do a second hearing test to see whether you hear the same sounds in the cochlea directly that you hear when the sound travels through the air.”
Oh. That was interesting. “Does it hurt?” She asked.
”It can be a little uncomfortable, since the headset has to put a bit of pressure on the bone in order to be able to transmit properly, but it shouldn’t be painful, no.”
”Alright.” She sat back again and allowed him to put the equipment over her head. It took a little more maneuvering and finagling before it was placed to his satisfaction than the other headset had, and it was a little bit uncomfortable like he’d said, but not too bad.
They went through another round of the beep test, he came in and swapped headsets for the other ear, tested it again. Once the bone conduction was completed, Kawamura switched back to the normal headset and played a series of words for her to repeat back. She did her best, though some of the words were similar enough to other words that she wasn’t sure if she’d gotten them right or not. She was just glad she didn’t have to strain her ears listening to any more beeping.
Once they finished testing, Kawamura asked her to wait for him in the examination room and continue filling out her worksheet while he cleaned his equipment and checked some things over.
Uraraka frowned down at her papers, wondering if it was normal for an audiologist to make so many notes on a patient who was in the clear, or if the extra time he was taking meant something was wrong. She thought she may have detected a hint of…something different in his tone at the end of the test than what it had been at the start of the appointment, and it concerned her a bit, but maybe she was just worrying over nothing. He didn’t seem upset or anything, so she probably did okay, right? It’s not like she had any trouble hearing stuff in class or anything. Well, except when it got noisy and chaotic, but that was normal. Anyone would have trouble hearing the teacher with a bunch of students chatting to each other nearby.
Right?
Kawamura sighed to himself as he looked over the freshly printed audiogram, mentally preparing himself for a potentially difficult conversation.
He’d been doing audiology exams at hero schools for eleven years, and every year there were at least a few cases of slight hearing loss caused by too much loud music or some other youthful carelessness in each school, especially in the first-years. Those were the students who would receive a warning that their actions were damaging their ears, but they weren’t likely to require further intervention until a decade or two down the line, so long as they took his advice seriously to protect their hearing from being damaged further. Being hero students, most of them actually cared enough to listen.
On the flip side, the students who came in with more significant hearing issues had usually been diagnosed already, and didn’t truly need the post-test diagnostic, although it was, of course, an established part of the appointment. Their “practice appointments” weren’t telling them anything they didn’t already know.
It was a little less common to get a student who was entirely unaware that they had a significant hearing loss in the first place. Even when someone did receive a new hearing loss diagnosis in his office, they usually came in suspecting that something was wrong, and had already mentally prepared themselves for their results to some extent. Not that an unexpected diagnosis never happened, but it wasn’t as frequent of an occurrence.
He just hoped she wouldn’t take it too hard; these hero types were occasionally too hard on themselves about these sorts of things.
Uraraka was halfway through the second page of the hearing wellness worksheet when Kawamura stepped into the room with a couple pieces of paper in his hand. “Are you at a good stopping point, or should I wait a minute?” He asked.
She held up her hand for a second while she finished her sentence, then put her pencil down and pushed the packet to the side. “There. That’s good enough for now. So. What now?”
Kawamura sat down across from her. “Now, it’s time to go over your results.”
Uraraka mirrored his position, clasping her hands together in place of the papers and leaning forward. “What have we got?”
He placed the first paper on the table and slid it towards her. Taking a deep breath, he said, “This is a chart of your current hearing thresholds. The higher up a point is on the graph, the better your hearing is at that frequency. The farther down it is, the worse your hearing.”
She caught the paper and spun it around, looking it over.
It was a graph chart alright, but she didn’t know what most of it meant. What was Hz and dB? She could, however, see the downward trend on the graph. Uraraka felt a sudden sinking feeling. She still didn’t know what the graph meant, exactly, but if your hearing was worse the further down you went…it looked like some of her graph points weren’t anywhere near as high up as they should be.
Kawamura opened his mouth again. “From the looks of things,” he said gently, “Your low frequency hearing is still normal. That’s those first few points on the left side of the audiogram. But you start to see a small amount of hearing loss when you look at the middle frequencies”—he pointed to a little line on the side of the graph labeled ‘Slight’ which lined up with a couple of the points in the middle of the graph—“and a bit more loss in the high frequencies.” He pointed again, to the line labeled ‘Mild’ which lined up with the last few points. “In audiology, we call this a Slight-to-Mild hearing loss, meaning that you have some frequencies with a slight amount of loss and some frequencies with a mild amount of loss.”
Uraraka blinked, staring at the page, surprised to hear the words “hearing loss” being spoken in relation to herself. What? Me? But I’m just a kid!
”You mean…hearing loss? Are you saying…am I- am I going deaf?”
He sighed. “You might be. Or you might not. At this point, we don’t actually know. It depends on what’s causing the loss. That’s why we usually schedule follow-up appointments when we first discover someone has a hearing loss; we can’t assume that it’s stable from the first audiogram. There are a lot of things that could be a potential cause—though from the shape of your audiogram, I suspect yours is probably noise related. Have you spent a lot of time around loud noises without using hearing protection? Loud concerts, hobbies that use power tools, having your headphones on full volume all the time, things like that?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think—wait.” She paused. “Actually…I used to spend a lot of time at my family’s construction company. We didn’t have the money for me to get into any school clubs or anything, so I used to hang out with my dad at the workshop. There was a lot of loud machinery and stuff. I think he uses headphones most of the time, but…” she swallowed. “I guess he forgot, or didn’t realize I was there as much as I was. I think I did wear earplugs a few times, but most of the time I just snuck in and watched from a short distance.”
”That’s the most likely reason, then. You see that place where there’s a little notch on the graph? That’s something you usually see in damage caused by long-term exposure to loud noises.”
She nodded, then frowned as something occurred to her. “But, Kawamura-san…I can hear you talking to me right now just fine. How can I have a hearing loss if I can still hear you? I mean- I can hear my teachers fine, and I can’t think of any problems I’ve had or anything.”
“It’s largely because you still have plenty of residual hearing—your loss is a mild one. Most people don’t even bother coming in to get checked out until their hearing is already so bad that it’s greatly interfering with their quality of life, but mild losses tend to primarily present problems in situations where most people would occasionally have trouble hearing anyway, things that can be explained away in the moment. So it’s actually pretty common for a mild hearing loss to go undetected for years before the person puts enough clues together to seek treatment. If your symptoms developed slowly over a period of time, then you probably hadn’t even realized you were having problems.”
”Oh.” She looked down at the graph again, her eyes running along the damning downward slope. “I see.” A part of her still didn’t want to believe it. It didn’t feel quite real, sitting here talking to someone about having a hearing loss, especially when she could hear him perfectly clearly.
Something must have shown on her face, because Kawamura sighed and laid a gentle hand on her arm. “Look, we have a timetable to hold to right now, so I’m going to have to let you go in a few minutes…but if you’d like, I can talk to your teachers and we can schedule a follow-up appointment off-campus sometime in the next few weeks, where we can talk through this some more. I’ll make sure to schedule you with me so you’re not working with someone unfamiliar, and we’ll see about figuring this out, alright?”
Uraraka sniffed and nodded, suddenly feeling strangely lost and unmoored. “Okay.”
”Okay. I know it can be overwhelming, finding out something like this, but I promise you it’s not the end of the world. We’ll find out what’s going on, and now you’ll know to be watching out for any changes in the future. That’s what these hero checkup appointments are for—catching these kinds of things early, before they become an invisible problem that could get you hurt in the field because no one knew it was there.” He hesitated, “Is there…someone I should call down here that you’d like to talk to? A classmate or teacher you’d like to hang out with? You look like you could use a friend.”
Visit Summary
Uraraka Ochako 12/27/2XXX
Age: 15
This is a summary of your visit to our clinic on X/X/2XXX
Your Diagnosis on this visit
[ Sensorineural Hearing Loss, Bilateral] Sensorineural hearing loss in both ears
Recommended Treatment
-followup appointments should be scheduled to determine hearing threshold stability and discuss potential causes and treatment options
-consider hearing amplification for both ears
-recommend that the patient consider incorporating assisted listening technology and hearing protection into her hero costume
Further Commentary
-cause of hearing loss is currently undetermined, but the shape of the audiogram indicates noise exposure may be a factor; patient has mentioned being around a lot of loud construction tools during childhood without ear protection.
Uraraka sat on the floor in the hallway clutching three new pieces of paper—her audiogram, her tympanogram (whatever that was; she didn’t have the mental energy to bother with wondering about it right now), and her appointment summary paper—to the top of her stack of worksheets. Now that she was outside of the clinical setting of the audiology office, the swirl of confusion threatened to drag her into tears. Hopefully that wouldn’t interfere with her vision exam later.
At least she didn’t have to go to that until after lunch.
Hearing loss…sure, she’d been given hearing screenings along with everyone else in her younger school years, but she’d never really thought about it before. It just wasn’t something that typically came up in her daily life, and when she did think about it, it was in terms of other people. Other kids, people outside her circle of friends and family. And even if she had ever given it thought, she wouldn’t have imagined it happening to herself.
Heck, was it even true? Did she really have a hearing loss? Maybe she’d done the test wrong, messed up on something. Maybe the program used to record the numbers had been set wrong. Maybe the headphones weren’t working right, or maybe her ears were just having problems today and they’d be fine in the morning.
She wanted it to be true, wanted to run back into the office and demand that he test her again right this second, because surely something had gotten mixed up…But she knew the test was right. It explained several things she’d noticed in the last couple of years, but had either dismissed or forgotten at the time.
Just like he said people normally do-
Her swirling thoughts were interrupted by a sudden patter of footsteps, and a small part of her was vaguely relieved that at least that was something she could still hear. The rest of her was too busy jumping off the floor so she could scurry out of the way to be worried or relieved about anything, and she was glad she’d moved a second later when Deku came dashing around the corner, his red sneakers screeching across the floor.
Was the screeching quieter than it used to be?
“Uraraka-san! You’re still here! Are you done with the hearing test? It’s time for lunch—hey, are you okay?”
She tried her best to school her face into an expression that didn’t show any of the turmoil of the past twenty minutes, and paste her usual cheer onto her face. “I’m fine! Just…took a little longer than I was expecting, that’s all.”
He frowned. “Are you sure? You know I’m here if you need anything, right?”
Her plastered-on smile turned a little more genuine. “I know. Thanks, Deku-kun. I don’t really want to talk about it right now, but maybe later?”
”Okay. If you’re sure.”
”I’m sure.”
Deku peered into her eyes for a long moment, but eventually nodded. “Alright. Well, like I said- it’s time to go to lunch. I came to find you in case you were running late. Are you done with your testing?”
”Almost. I still have the eye appointment, but that’s after lunch.”
”Great! Let’s go!”
They headed toward the cafeteria, Deku chattering along the whole way. Uraraka would usually have joined in, but today she was content to let him ramble unimpeded. She found herself focusing in on his voice, analyzing every moment of uncertainty whenever something wasn’t immediately intelligible, trying to figure out if there was anything missing or different. She eventually gave up on this as he gradually devolved into a mutter-rant; no one could keep up with what he was saying when he really got going.
Or did I just think that was the case? Maybe everyone else can follow his mutterings. Maybe it’s just me.
They arrived at the cafeteria and collected their lunches, then went to their usual table with their friends. Uraraka remained unusually quiet all through lunch, spending more time listening than she did talking. She barely remembered to eat, she was so focused on all the sounds around her. Was she imagining that some of her classmates were easier to hear than others? No one else seemed bothered by the level of noise, but she found herself focusing on the things that the people close to her were saying in an effort to follow what the people further away were talking about.
Was she even a naturally talkative person, or did she talk so much because she was avoiding having to try and listen to everyone else?
No. No, that was taking it too far. Now she was just being paranoid. She’d been chatty ever since she was a little kid; that was nothing new.
Still. It nagged at her, not knowing whether she was behaving in certain ways because it was natural, or if she was doing it because she was trying to compensate for not hearing something.
As the lunchroom began to clear a bit, Iida gave her his own look of concern, and opened his mouth as if he wanted to ask her something, but Deku caught his arm before he could do more than say the beginning of her name. “Uraraka-san, you have an eye appointment in about ten minutes, right? We probably-shouldn’t keep-you-here-if-you-need-to-get-going-so-we’ll-seeyouinpracticelaterbye!”
Uraraka watched Deku drag Iida away, equal parts grateful and mystified. She didn’t quite know what he’d said at the end there, but somehow in that moment, it didn’t seem to matter so much. She looked down at her half-eaten lunch with a little giggle.
Well. She did have her eye appointment in ten minutes, Deku was right about that. She should probably finish as much of her food as she could while there was still time.
As she stuffed her face in a manner at which her mother would have been appalled, she noticed Bakugo was watching her oddly, too. She gave him a raised eyebrow and shoved another bite of food into her mouth, silently daring him to comment.
Who cared about presentation, anyway?