Hearing & Listening.

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I tend to have difficulty hearing people talk when lots of other people talk in the same room. This is why there is no way I could do school again, because with a lack of discipline in the classroom, so things would be noisy, I just would not be able to hear the teacher. When we had the slipper or cane, if kids kept talking the threat would make them stop. It worked. A nice quiet classroom to work in.
A noisy classroom and I would have my fingers in my ears! Too much noise. Too mny talking or shouting at the same time!
The last time I had a job before Christmas, they had me on thw shop floor for an afternoon, and I had to use the headphone talking thing at the same time as speaking to customers. I got in a right mess. I couldn't cope with two voices at the same time through different ears.
When I was about seven years old, one cold frosty morning I woke up and there was the lovely pattern of frost on the bedroom windows on the inside, and I found that my pillow was full of blood. A lot of blood. I thought I had had a nose bleed, but no. One of my ear drums had burst due to the cold.
This aas the late 1970's and I was taken to the hospital. They wanted to keep me in overnight. I think they wanted me to stay there for a week? I was far to clingy to my parents to be seperated, and fortunately they had no available beds, so a doctor emptied an entire bottle of ear drops down my ear followed by cotton wool and I was sent home. They kept saying I was brave because of the pain. I don't remember much about the pain. I was more panicing as I didn't want to be seperated from my Mum. I would have gladly lost my hearing then spend time seperated from my Mum.
I habe later found out that the over clingyness is due to faceblindness. I neeed a familiar person in my life. Why I went so quiet in the first few years in school. I was petrified!
Anyway. Moving on many years later, and I had to have a hearing test for a new railway job. I did pass, but they said one ear only just passed but the other had very good hearing. They wanted to know why? If I had had an injury or been tested for being deaf etc. I had to really think back as for a while I had forgotton about the burst ear drum, though in my teenage years to early 20's I often had an ear blocked up, which gave me many issues in hearing at school. Doctor said "It was one of those things" and wasn't interested. I never told the school that though. But it did mean I could not hear people talk if other people were talking.
Now I assumed not hearing people talk was due to blocked ear but after my mid 20's it has unblocked (I had prayered as a blocked eardrum feels so claustrophobic... I felt cut off from the outside world!) and I have never had issues since. But even though both ears work fine, they still aork together in that I find I can't seperate one from the other to differentiate one voice from another if that makes sense? However, if I put on a pair of headphones and listen to sterio music from one side to the other I can hear which side and which ear it comes from, but more then one person talking is difficult or impossible to do? So it is not my not hearing them.... I can do it where I am in a conversation and others are also and are a distance from us. But not when it is a crowded room. Strange!