aural reaction

when reading someones response to the question of which sense they'd loose if given the choice, i realize i have a lot of anxiety about it. a lot. it's rather tough to even discuss it with anyone unless it's a one on one conversation. i thought i should take to le blog to see if i can hash it out.

i'm dating a girl who has no sense of smell. she was in a horrible accident where a car hit her and she smashed her head really badly in one spot. in the weeks after she came out of the haze of recovery she realized something was off. eventually she realized that the knock to the head damaged the area that handles the sense of smell. there were two options. it would heal over time & come back or it was smashed in & never to work again.

the latter was the case. she still has no sense of smell but can still taste things. tho she has a hard time gauging the spiciness of things. as someone who loves heat i'm always shoveling all the food down my throat, but to a wimp it would be far too much to handle.

she has to live and die with a kitchen timer as she'd never know if something was burning save for when the smoke piles out and it's too late. also it's nerve wracking to guess if you do or don't smell after cycling and opts to shower far more than what's needed.

i am bad for scents & then layering them. i love cologne & sandalwood oil... scented bath washes and shampoo that hovers around the body. the 3rd time i went over to her place to hang out prior to dating i recall spending over 30 minutes trying to decide what i'd put on. "this cologne with sandalwood on top? just sandalwood? something more natural?" and then realized she can't smell it & I was just jerking myself off essentially as it wouldn't even register with her.

it's always fascinating to talk to her about it. since i'm so scent-driven i don't just tell you what it reminds me of, i tell you the beginning, middle and end. it's not JUST this, it's a bunch of things. it's similar to describing wine. it's not enough to throw one word out, i work hard to capture all of it. twice i've sold myself cologne as the sales staff listened to me describe what everything registered in my brain as i smelled deeply then threw coffee beans in a bowl under my nose as a scent sorbet. one lady wrote down my description & when i wandered past her a month later said she had sold tons of the cologne using the descriptive words.

needless to say, smell is a detailed story for me and it's never enough to simplify. poetry is lost on my wordiness [see above] and 3 words doesn't cut it.

with smell being so finely tuned i have to confess i stress about my sense of hearing. i spent over a year & a half in and out of ear specialist offices getting multiple hearing tests and fretful "hmms" as someone shone a light into my ears.

i developed eczema in my ear canals that was like having a moderate to severe ear infection. it was hot, sticky and felt like bacon grease attempting to slither out my ears all day and night. there was blood, skin pieces and a sickly fetid output of infection constantly. if i turned my head suddenly i'd get a wafting slap of it and stressed myself out that it was noticeable to anyone within 3 feet of me. it had to be... if you've ever seen a cat with ear mites, you get the visual. pathetic scratching, dejected little face and no actual relief. just the burning impulse to try again.

the infection slowly clouded my hearing. at first it was just a matter of paying close attention. then it progressed to being lost if there were too many people talking at the same time. then i would walk into work on days where the infection had gotten worse and there was no hearing in one side and hardly anything on the other.
when i was an executive assistant i would have to take meeting minutes and finally i got busted when the meeting minutes spiraled from detailed to a half page of point form notes. most gathered from email follow ups where i prompted attendees to reiterate their points for clarity. when it was actually because i couldn't hear them down the long boardroom table.

my one boss took me aside to ask if i was getting bored hence the lack of detail, but i finally confessed it was because i couldn't hear properly. he was good about it and made me sit in the middle of the table to get a better snap shot of everyone speaking. and encouraged me to prompt people to reiterate if i wasn't sure. and had to present him with an appointment card for an ear doctor to show i was getting it looked after.
thus far my dr was her usual indifferent cunt self and said it was an ear infection and it'll clear up. after 4 visits and a nurse syringing a jelly bean sized plug of dried blood out of my left ear she finally gave me a referral to an ear specialist.
the ear doc said it was a severe case of eczema and wound up taking pictures to submit for a conference discussion. yay. regardless he began documenting my hearing range and had to come in every 3 months for follow ups. every time it slipped more and he finally snapped at me that i was faking some of the hearing tests.

you can *try* to guess on the tests... or i thought i could. i'd throw my hand up to say i could hear a tone before i actually could. but the trained professionals can see on your face the subtle pulls and jerks when you can hear something. i was just trying to boost my mark up and finally got called on it. it was getting worse and the ear doctor said i need to start dealing with it as he didn't know how far it would degrade.

every appointment he had to pin my head down to use tiny picks and a mouse-ear sized suction to try and clear my ears and see if it helped. it didn't sound like i was living in a fish tank after... for a few days a week max.

i was freaking out inside. i hid it completely save for complaining about how painful my ears felt. i refused to use the phone as i could never turn the volume up enough. i drastically decreased listening to music as it sounded like what a goldfish senses swimming in a bowl. blurry and more thuds and clicks, not what i remembered it sounding like.

i switched jobs and had a co-worker call me out on how i was looking at her lips, not eyes. i had opted to focus on the mouth to compensate and hope i would be left alone more often than not instead of dealing with not hearing things properly.

have you ever seen the movie "It's All Gone Pete Tong"? it's about a dj who goes deaf and slinks into a complete world of madness and depression. the high pitched ringing feedback and the recreation of him listening to people terrifies me to this day. it's so spot on... the lying or aping conversations to try and duck out of coming to terms with what was happening. the ringing whine that you can't shake and the blurbling way sound is heard makes me shake just writing this.

I listen to music a lot. i would say i have my iPod on for 2 hours minimum a day not including listening to radio on my computer. i can't play music to save my life and would be medically diagnosed as tone fucking deaf. which makes me custom designed to be a music critic: talentless, voracious to consume as much as i can and stuck up. if i never saw another concert again I would have seen more than the average person in their lifetime. the autistic-minded detachment i feel around people is connected through music in my head. it's my hug when i struggle with human contact. and when my hearing slipped every time i had a test i became fantastically depressed. it was something i enjoyed being pulled away from me one decibel at a time. the only thing that registered was drum and bass music being so low & throbbing. eventually, i started loosing some of the tones in that and i stopped listening to all music. i couldn't hear the tv and instead hid behind Kurt Vonnegut & Charles Bukowski books. reading them aloud in the garage as i laid on the dusty couch was a tedious exercise as i couldn't tell if i was saying things coherently. It forced me to listen to the drone of words and not get even more detached than i already was. also, it's vaguely unsatisfying to cry and not hear yourself... which sounds silly, but i found it upset me to no end. it wasn't even a release and my face getting hot and teary only inflamed my ears more and felt like i was burying myself deeper.

the ear doctor noted that i hadn't been taking a massive dump in hearing loss and hopefully was plateauing. there wasn't an option to get a hearing aid as the eczema would not be abated and shoving plastic in there would be a bad idea. the ear doc patiently scraped out my ears tut-tutting the shit he yanked out, occasionally showing me if there was something remarkable. i was pinned down so i wouldn't move during the delicate procedure so there really isn't much to do but mmhmm every time something was waved in your face.

after a year and a half of having what felt like a mid-range ear infection i just started to accept that this might never go away. as-is. it was just a part of me indefinitely. the doctor still tried as much as he could to tame the weeping infection to try and get me geared up for a hearing aid but we were stuck in a holding pattern of appointments, tut-tutting and kind shoulder squeezes as he said loudly he'd see me again in a few months.

it was late spring and my friend needed an extra set of hands to help him dig up baby leeks to pickle. it was hours on your hands & knees ripping up leeks and trying not to alert people as we were on a public trail in the woods. we harvested and came home for the 2 hour process of cleaning & prepping the leeks before we made the brine. as we were doing a massive run of them, there was a lobster pot-sized vat of water, salt and vinegar to make the pickling brine. we worked in silence, only taking cigarette breaks with our nails packed with soil even after multiple washes. the second smoke break we turned the stove on to bring the brine to a boil. we came back into the kitchen to a haze of vinegar vapors that made our eyes get puffy and sputter out some coughs. back to work & after 3 hours being in a sauna of vinegar fumes we were done. i noticed my left ear near the opening felt firm and swollen. but nothing that was different from any other bad day.

i woke up at 3am crying like a child... it was so painful and i was dizzy. when i finally staggered up the 3 steps to the bathroom to look in a mirror the ear openings were almost entirely swollen shut. i could hear nothing. at all. in the slightest. of course this fell on a weekend when my roommate was gone and the doctors office walk in was closed due to vacation.

i reluctantly cabbed to a community walk in. i took a lot of cabs when i lived in waterloo so i barked the address to dispatch, hollered that i was temporarily deaf & couldn't talk. the driver was one i've had a ton of times and had two hearing aids. he made me sit for a minute to say where i needed to go and even gave me his cell number to text him when i was done to avoid the embarrassment of calling dispatch again.
in i went and told the nurse at triage that my ears were swollen & I couldn't hear. she jokingly started using huge arm gestures thinking i would find it amusing but put my head down on the desk and bawled. the people in the waiting area looked at me when she carted me out like i had just miscarried in the back office and thankfully was parked away in the corner. she came & got me after a short 2 hour wait to see the doctor. he got me to write out what happened and then went to shine a light in my ear. the black thingie wouldn't go in. then got a kids one. and it wouldn't go in. and then finally grabbed an infant-sized one that he couldn't twist in far enough to see. he wrote out "uh oh" on the paper. he kept me holed up in a room to try and squeeze ear drops down the tiny hole. eventually i could feel one side get some in & was sent home with anti inflammatory meds & a heavy antibiotic. 4 days later of total silence the swelling pulled back. another 4 days after that it was open again... and the eczema was completely gone. the only thing that came out was a long curl of dry skin in each ear and it was as fresh and smooth. no infection, no burning, no rotting skin.
i went into the ear doctors again and he was shocked. 50% of my hearing loss was from the infection & build up. i essentially came to with my hearing boosted exponentially. to the point that i felt freaked out by loud sounds as i'd been a long while since i processed them.

i still have hearing loss on my left side... which is great since i'm always a passenger in a car so i can tune out drivers really fast. the estimate is that i should be able to make it another 10 years before i need to get kitted out with a hearing aid... i can live with that. or more specifically, i can be in denial about it for a really long time before i have to deal with it.