so, my second anniversary of total deafness is coming up and i'm beginning to consciously cull the stress right out of my life because i am not going to lose it again because of something as stupid as being worried about what time bedtime occurs or if the kid wears clean socks to school. i have quit the cigarettes because it is too goddamned cold to waste my time in a huddle doing something that will slowly kill me...
and so...
when i was around four years old my mom's mother, who died that year... and was a primo elementary school teacher, noticed that i was not responding to normally volume-d stimuli... like i was sitting too close to the tv to hear it and not responding if she was behind me and so on and so forth... so they had my hearing tested and i got my first set of hearing aides... behind the ear big ones that little kids still wear today... my dr. was Dr. Golden, if you can believe it and he was perpetually tanned with blond hair and i thought very clearly that his name was also his embodiment..
they thought at the time that maybe a childhood fever had knocked the hearing down.
When I was around 24 or so, living in Florida, I was on my bike riding to the beach and got hit by a car and broke all the bones in my right ear (so freaking crazy, but true) . We completely lied to my employer and told him that the fan in the stockroom had cracked my head so he would pay for the emergency room visit. but ! because i didn't have insurance they didn't do a catscan and sent me home. (its one of the only downfalls of the Keys, you never know what you're going to get with the 'professionals' you are dealing with... are they high?) the hearing didn't come back and i moved back home with my folks to await state health insurance, which i got... then had a surgery to fix those broken bones which did not work.
seriously, the surgery just didn't work. i was that thirty percent that they talk about... i do have to say it was the worst surgery i have ever had because it really messed with equilibrium and i felt nausea for a long time when i opened my eyes. That part was over pretty quick though. I had to wait five weeks with my ear all packed up to find out it hadn't worked. that was sort of depressing . ah. anyhow, then i moved back out and within six months or so, caught a cold and was compleetely deafened. (for the first time) i was so young. my god. i was so young and i just moved back home again with pammylove driving me up the coast and got a job loading boxes in a winery and gradually my hearing just came back. in that one good ear...
anyhow, at this point i had insurance and i got all checked out. turns out that i have malformed cochlea - from birth. no fever. no nothing. mondini malformations.
and everytime i get beaned on the head i risk losing it all again. still nothing in my right ear. THEN.
two years ago, feb 4, day after the superbowl. i woke up to no sound. checked my hearing aide battery downstairs but already knew. nothing. no sound. had a two month old baby in bed with me and my husband was in a 100 hr a week residency . he took the day off.
we got to an audiologist and an ear doc within a few hours. benefit of medical connections. they shot steroids through my eardrum into the canal and told me to sit tight. what i learned later was that they had very little hope.
shure thing.
six weeks later, it gradually began to come back. heard my kid cry again. was able to sleep without keeping my hand on his chest in case he cried.
could hear my son's stories about what he spent the day doing.
totally blurry picture of my family below... favorite horse in wild action...no sound neccessary to enjoy...
maybe another time i'll write about how that all felt. but for now, its history.
5 comments:
I simply cannot imagine.
Wow!
Oh wow. I love that you blog about it. My hearing loss is congenital apparently in both ears, but the ear that I barely hear out of (my right) is due to a blow at the head when I was in highschool...the rest of it didn't get bad until after I had kids.
I was thinking about not being able to hear your children...when I was going through my divorce, my exhusband was trying to use my handicap to get custody, saying I couldnt hear the kids. So, I had my hearing tested and had the doc submit the results.
Wow. Do your husband and kids use sign language? How did you get along during the time of complete hearing loss? I really can't imagine how tense you must be after something as sudden and unpredictable as that.
hey jen and company... we don't use sign much right now as everyone is verbal now... mostly. the two year old is hardly verbal but beyond 'more' and 'all done' signs... but i know a lot of sign, its jsut that if it happens again... its not me who needs to know it, but them... and thats trickier. we see a lot of 'signing time' videos... i'll write more sometime about all the emotional repercussions of it all but its a whole series... :)
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