A creative nonfiction piece. (Photo from Pinterest)
I’m going to get my hearing back.
I’m going to get my hearing back!
There are some phrases you don’t get tired of repeating. There are some experiences you do.
“Elise?”
“What?”
This dialogue is repeated every day, but this moment happened only a few months ago. I remember it very clearly.
My mom sighed and repeated herself with her big, sympathetic eyes. “Your surgeon says you need another surgery. You still have part of your tumor, and he says it’s nearing your facial nerve. I’m so sorry, honey.”
I nodded and left to scrub the dishes in the sink. It was full again.
I heard them all talking about me in the other room. They think just because I’m legally deaf I can’t hear them. But I could; just not well enough to know what they were saying. I could tell by their tone it was about me.
I scrubbed the dishes harder.
“You need another surgery.” Those are not the words you want to hear. Especially when your last surgery, only three years ago, went so wrong. When your four hour surgery gained an extra two hours, as your surgeon who’s close to retiring performed one of his top three hardest surgeries ever. (His words, not mine). When you’re surprised with losing all hearing in your right ear thanks to the tumor that had been growing undiscovered for eight years. When you are so completely nauseous for two weeks straight you can hardly even watch tv from bed. You can hardly even sit in bed without the walls turning into a kaleidoscope and your bed tilting out from under you.
But you can’t unhear words. And I couldn’t ignore the reality of the situation. I was going back in. But! This time it was going to be different. This time I was going to be able to regain 100% of my hearing. My surgeon was confident.
I met with an audiologist in January.
“Sit in here,” she gestured and I stepped into the large box with a glass wall for them to watch me struggle to hear. She placed headphones over my ears.
“We’re going to listen to both ears first,” she said.
I did okay, hearing the louder noises and missing the softer or shriller ones. Then it was time for testing only my right ear.
My audiologist grabbed a hearing aid and placed it in my right ear. “Okay, so I’m going to play a beep into this hearing aid and all you need to do is raise your hand when you hear it.”
I nodded, heart thumping.
It was the strangest phenomenon: I didn’t want to need a cochlear implant, but if I needed one I did want it. Then the hearing test began, and my only indication of it starting was that she was looking at me expectantly.
And it happened! I felt a vibration against my left skull and raised my hand. Okay, so maybe I could hear better than I thought.
I raised my hand a few more times before she leaned into the microphone to speak through my soundproof enclosure. “Elise, are you actually hearing the sound or just feeling it?”
My mouth dropped. I sat there, pondering in my head. If I admit to feeling it, would that mean I really do get a cochlear implant? Yet I still didn’t even know if that's what I wanted.
“I honestly don’t know,” I admitted. It’s hard to tell when that’s how you’ve been hearing for three years.
“Where do you feel it?” She was squinting her eyes, probably considering how to figure this out. I pointed to the left of my skull, and she shook her head. “I’m sorry, I think you’re feeling it. Here’s the sound.” She played a beep through the mic, and the shrill sound reverberated in my skull.
Sighing and holding tears back, I nodded. “Yep, just feeling.”
“Let’s keep trying,” she began, and I could hear her well-practiced attempt to sound cheery. “We need to finish the test so I can submit everything to insurance.”
I sat there for who really knows how long, but it felt like twenty minutes. I’m sure it was more like five. My skull would vibrate each time, so I didn’t miss the fact that I was supposed to hear it. Each time my hand would flinch, wanting to raise and tell her “Look! I’m not broken, I can hear it this time!” No such luck.
Defeated, I stepped out and looked at her apologetic smile: I had my answer. I was with no doubt a candidate for a cochlear implant.
Still, I tried to tell myself, this feels right. Everything happens for a reason.
As with most life-changing events: my emotions were swirling around my mind so quickly I couldn’t choose which one I would focus on at which time.
As I waited to know whether insurance would let us get the implant, I did my research. I watched The Bachelor for the first time, admiring Daisy and her own journey of receiving an implant. I would smile as I related to her each time she said she was nervous to talk to large groups, each time she would ask someone to repeat themselves, and each time she would be vulnerable enough to share her journey to hearing. I could do this, I began to think.
I watched Tik Toks to hear what a cochlear implant would sound like when you turn it on—pro tip, don’t do this if you’re trying to stop feeling nervous. When people say it sounds like aliens they aren’t kidding. The scratchy, rumbling voices and harsh sounds could be all I heard for six months as I trained my brain to hear again with an electronic implant. Did I really think I could do this?
I began to ask God questions for so long my knees became sore. Can I do this? Can you help me do this?
Insurance got back to us swiftly, willing to cover the implant. This news was huge. I was going to be able to hear! My excitement grew. I had to go have surgery again, but I would be able to hear even as short as six months after. My hesitation for an implant floated away before I could think to catch it, and I only felt excitement. At least for the time being.
For the next few months until my surgery date at the end of March, I spent my time teetering between being so anxious I couldn’t focus on anything else and looking forward to hearing.
No more wondering what I missed out on
No more watching people talk and not knowing what they were saying.
No more laughing at a joke I never heard.
I would tell people, “I have another surgery coming up, but I’m getting a cochlear implant. I’ll be able to hear out of my right ear.”
“That’s so exciting!” They would say. At first, my mind would argue ‘No it isn’t!” But after I heard it over and over, I realized it really had become exciting.
Then it was time. Time to hear, time to experience all the sounds I’ve forgotten. The sounds that have been stowed away so long they’ve collected dust.
I was significantly less nervous for this surgery, because this surgery wasn’t just a loss. I was going to wake up changed for the better. I signed my paperwork, changed into my hospital gown, and laid in the bed while I waited the hour and a half until my surgery. I had conversations with two nurses, my surgeon, and my two anesthesiologists without breaking out into a panic attack. I didn’t even need the anxiety medication they had given me last time. I was fine. I was going to be fine.
…I was not fine.
Physically? I was awake from the anesthesia and doing well—if you ignored the growing pain as the meds wore off—and I would heal quickly. Much, much quicker than last time. My tumor was removed and it was no time before I was shuffling around the halls in my grippy socks, proving to my recovery nurse that I was, well, recovered. In fact, I was emotionally okay at the time too. Then my mom came back to see me.
I smiled at her as she sat by my hospital bed, feeling light and still on whatever drugs they gave me.
She smiled back at me, but something was wrong with it. It wasn’t a real smile. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, cocking my head slightly before remembering the pulsing pain that was already forcing its way through the numbness. I winced and moved it back slowly. My head felt heavy, and it wasn’t just from all the gauze. The pain throbbed in my skull, neck, ear, inside my ear.
“Honey, did they tell you about the surgery?”
I looked down briefly, only moving my eyes. “No?”
Tears began to pool in her own eyes. “You… well, your surgeon came out to talk to me. He told me you’re okay, but the tumor was bigger than they thought—”
My mind stopped listening. It stopped listening clear up until she said it.
“They couldn’t place the implant.”
Pain worse than the one on the entire right side of my head began throbbing in my heart and at the back of my throat. My chest felt tight, my throat felt swollen, the pain in my head became less bearable. My own tears began filling my vision, and I struggled to take deep breaths. I think I said something like, “Oh.”
It doesn’t matter what I said. Only what I heard. With one ear. With the only ear I’d be able to hear out of.
The thing I had been waiting so long for, the thing I had prayed for, the thing I had grown to feel excited for, snatched from me during the very surgery that promised my hearing back. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be deaf, scared of venturing into public areas and timid of having to admit to another person why I couldn’t hear them over the tv.
There were lots of tears after that. There were tears as I waited for my pain medication, as I wiped at my tears with the tissues that smelled like the hospital I was still trapped in, as I was wheeled out to my mom’s car still clutching said tissues, and as we drove back.
Why? Why, why, why?
It was all I could think. Not why me, because I didn’t think I was any less deserving than anyone else to have something hard happen. I just wondered why.
George Weasley again became my doppelganger. You remember that one scene where he has a wrap around his unusable right ear? Well the resemblance was uncanny. Only I didn’t have a smile or joke to spare. They had been removed with my tumor. With my hope for hearing, lost once again in only three short years.
My reflection was hard to look at; not so much because of the head wrap around my ear and new scar after it was removed, but because of the sadness I could see in my eyes. Maybe I was just being dramatic. I often was.
But this was different. I was going to hear! As in, be able to talk and laugh and go to social events without freaking out. Be able to have class discussions without spending too much effort trying to hear the students around me. Be able to listen without being totally exhausted by the end.
No.
Instead, I had to “become a better person,” and get better “resilience.” Yeah, sure, that’s what I wanted. Really, I just wanted to get my hearing back.
I just wanted to get my hearing back.
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