Recently I went to the ENT department and had my hearing tested. Ooh, that sounds like I just sailed in, doesn't it? Ha ha, she laughed darkly, I had to wait two months for an appointment. Anyway. The right ear, which has not stopped humming and buzzing since April, has been bugging the shit out of me, but I figured it was tinnitus and there's nothing anyone can do about that. What scared me into getting a hearing test was the discovery one night that I couldn't hear most of the noise from a jet going overhead when I had my "good" ear pressed to the pillow.
The test revealed there is definitely a loss of high and low tones in the right ear, but nothing radical or indicative of long term hearing loss. The doctor said it wasn't ear wax, and it wasn't any kind of infection, despite what anyone else said. He thinks it's characteristic of sudden nerve damage, a thin sheaf of something spontaneously snapping and the nerve taking a long time to regenerate. And it will, he says, I should regain clear hearing in a year or two though I may always notice a slight difference in that ear.
So, you know, it's just like every time I go to the clinic. I am to wait and I'll get better on my own. There's never any medication to take for stuff that goes wrong with my body. I don't know why I even bother. Well, I do know. I don't trust my body. I should, but it's so finicky and stuff goes awry all the time. How am I to know what's normal and what's not? I don't have any clue about when to worry and when to tough it out. I'm still traumatized, I swear, by having had my baby teeth fall out. My teeth! They fell out! Augh!
I'm only half kidding. I have scary tooth dreams where I eat something and the teeth become like mozarella cheese and stay stuck in the food, drawing out like long stringy...okay, I'll stop. But man, I never got over my teeth coming out. Who knows what else might fall off?
Don't answer that.
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