I was considering re-titling this blog again, but to what end? It's not as if suddenly people will be rushing off to read the rantings of one man sitting behind a keyboard taking pounds of ideas, notions, feelings, and a few facts and blending them into a single literary goulash. For what? What would we call it this time? Occasional Examinations of a Life Somewhat Lived? The Public Secret Diary of a Bore? Or should I be hip, as I have been with the blog's current title, and draw my new name from popular culture, a song lyric perhaps. Perhaps New Eyes should be replaced with New Complaint. Both were taken from lyrics written by fellas with a couple of things in common with me... Caucasian, guitar players, song builders, dump takers, who have been known to make the occasional fool of themselves and often found their intentions misunderstood.. Other than that, there ain't a whole lot else that sets us together. One of 'ems dead and the other one is on his own planet that just happens to coexist with ours. Funny how that works. But whatever. This isn't about those guys. This is about me. Yeah! Remember me? The guy who started writing all of this stuff about his C-Diff scare last year? I'm that guy, the same guy who, miraculously, only suffers from Ulcerative Colitis, which is now reasonably well regulated.with some dietary adjustments and GI-specific anti-inflammatory medication.
No, today ain't about that. It's not about my guts at all. It's in my head this time. That same stupid old head that talked stupid old me into so many stupid decisions over the stupid old years is back, and this time, it's got a brand new problem. Forget the life-long struggles with mental illness (labels like depressive, bi-polar, manic-depressive, schizophrenic, chronic incurable blah blah blah were once bandied about and perhaps they fit the guy who wore them, but that's not even on the table for a potential topic of conversation anymore), no, this is new and different. Check it out!
Sitting at home some eleven days ago (that's October 21 for the lazy or the mathematically disinclined), working on homework for this math class I'm taking (it's never too late to get a college degree, you know... stay in school kids!), when I suddenly, and I mean SUDDENLY lose all hearing in my right ear. (Okay, so "all" shoulda probably gotten the all caps, italics, bold face treatment too, but whatever.) In the amount of time it take for a fly to figure out how to outmaneuver a flyswatter, I'm functionally deaf in one ear.
"Oh shit!" I think that's the first thing I said. Either that or "Hmmm. That's weird."I try the first thing I can think of... Let me thump around the ear and see if I can hear it. Nope. Not a sound. I overhear my wife and stepdaughter in the midst of a conversation in the next room. I can't hear what they're saying, but I can make out voices and I can tell the difference between the speakers by the tones and volume of their voices. So to further my experiment, I cover my right ear. I hear no different. Everything is as it was, so apparently my right ear isn't hearing much if anything. So I decided to isolate the right ear and find out exactly what it was hearing. So I covered my left ear, squished and contorted the earlobe all around an pushed it into the sound hole and all to make it as airtight as possible, and lo and behold, everything is gone. All sound has vanished from my world. I hear, for the first time in my entire life the sound of absolute complete total dead silence. I left it there for a minute, just to hear it, just to feel what it sounded like to not hear anything at all. Within a matter of seconds, though, my newfound perfect silence was interrupted by the sound of a tone which I can only describe as the cousin of a beep. It is similar to a beep, but it's not a beep. (For the record, I'm not talking about the beep of a car horn, I'm talking about the beep of hospital equipment. This sound somewhat resembles the second, and has no relation whatsoever to the first.) Therefore it's the cousin of a beep. I call this sound a beep's cousin because it certainly shares qualities with the beep, but it ain't the same at all. I unplugged my left ear and the conversation in the next room returned and beep's cousin remained. I don't have a lot of close friends, you know, the kind you talk to on a daily basis and go fishing with, or the kind you go watch a ball game with. I've got folks I know, and folks I care a lot for, but nobody to really call when something like that happens. What am I gonna say? "Hey man! You won't believe what happened! I can't hear shit outta my right ear!" Nah, just post a little something about it on Facebook maybe, then move along, assuming all will be back to normal the following day.
So I woke up the next morning hoping to find that something had changed. It had. Beep's cousin made himself most comfortable in my ear and brought along some his friends. There's the low hum, the cicada, and the random-ass weird sound that defies all explanation. But in addition to my newfound deafness and the arrival of Beep's cousin and company, Wednesday morning found me spinning around in all sorts of directions while the room and everything in it also span around in all sorts of directions. Walls melting, ground rising and falling in waves, all that good stuff that you'd expect from a poor attempt of using cinema to simulate the visuals of an LSD trip. Only this wasn't cinema. It was real life. My TV bowed to greet me as the walls behind it did a sort of clockwise semi-swirl dance that went into infinity but never actually completed one full rotation. As I closed my eyes and fell back onto the bed, unable to keep my balance, I noticed that the bed, too, had betrayed me, for as soon as I lay upon it, it began spinning. Turning ever so rapidly yet simultaneously slowly, tilting ever to the left, to the left, to the left, further and further, but never did I move. Never once did gravity intervene to remove me from this bed which was obviously performing somersaults in our bedroom. As I opened my eyes I saw that the bed was still indeed in its previously appointed location, and that all of the items on each of the shelves, the books, the musical instruments, the loose documents, the knick knacks and such, were all still exactly as they had been before. Their existence hadn't changed on iota. But my perception of their existence had been dramatically altered from the night before. And then I started to get scared...
*Remember the poor attempt of cinema to simulate LSD visuals I mentioned? I was referring to something like this. The video bears no similarity whatsoever to a real acid trip, but shares some common elements of vertigo.
But back to the story. I did the smart thing. I contacted my office and said I wouldn't be in that day, called my doctor and got in to see him that day. He took a look and said, "Well, you've got a little bit of liquid behind that ear, maybe that's all it is." So, he put me on a pack of prednisone and antibiotics and said, "Take this for a week." Let me know what happens......
......To be continued in Huh?? - Part 2: What Happens
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