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Any Star Trek fan will know that the greatest risk to personal injury is a red shirt; it's a literal red rag to the scary creatures or plants or gaseous energy monsters on whichever planet you've beamed down to. But in real life it turns out that it was Captain Kirk who suffered when one too many special effects explosions left him with tinnitus.
William Shatner, the Canadian actor who played the iconic captain, has been in the news recently over an admission that the ringing in his ears led him to contemplate suicide. He told the Globe magazine, "It was like listening to the hiss of a TV that's not tuned to a channel. I thought I'd go deaf or nuts. I thought of killing myself."
If you've heard the actor's peculiar spoken-word version - which is probably better described as a shouted-word version - of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, you might be forgiven for thinking he had gone deaf or nuts for the duration of the album it's drawn from, The Transformed Man. Q magazine would agree - it listed the album down in the bottom ten of the worst records ever - but I've been told off twice for thinking that.
Once was simply by a Trekkie who told me I mustn't knock "the Shat", on the basis that his style is simply idiosyncratic and misunderstood genius. More importantly, one of my no win, no fee colleagues reminded me that tinnitus and industrial deafness can be seriously debilitating conditions and, given our raison d'etre is in pursuing compensation claims on that basis, we shouldn't be making light of it. I apologised, of course.
The Trekkie also told me about the way in which the Ferengi feel about hearing loss; you'll remember, naturally, that these are the large-eared aliens with all the capitalist drive of 20th century humanity. When one became partially deaf due to near-starvation on a cold planet, on returning to his space station he told a friend that his culture meant he felt he was half the man he had been.
Back in real life, Shatner was treated more than ten years ago with a retraining device, along with counselling, which helped him to train his brain to ignore the noise. He now says he doesn't hear the hissing 95 percent of the time, which provides hope for other sufferers - and the actor has made an impassioned speech for the American Tinnitus Association that combines hope and gratitude. That speech can be viewed at YouTube.
If this were a truly inspirational personal injury article, I'd now realise from Shatner's overcoming his tinnitus and his provision of hope for other sufferers that I do, actually, take joy in his Beatles cover. If you want to believe that, you can stop reading here; the truth is actually that while I am happy for him and the hope others find in his achievements, what I want is a machine that can retrain my brain to ignore the song which now seems to have stuck in my head for good.
