Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Rambling: Everything's really loud, or, why am I posting this?

I can hear.

This is not unprecedented--I can mostly hear most of the time. But at the moment, it feels like a small miracle, because I can't remember when I could hear this well.

See, I have problem ears. They get clogged. Perhaps four times a year, I wander around tilting one ear at anyone who tries to talk to me, because the other ear is out of commission. I frantically dose the misbehaving ear with ear drops, or attack it with those rubber bulb things, and eventually it consents to function again.

This time, both ears went on strike, and after a week of repeating every other sentence to me, Himself insisted that it was time to seek out professional help. After learning that the fancy ENT has a long wait for appointments, we drove off to the walk-in clinic, where they applied tools and fancy water-blasting gadgets, and now I can hear. (Himself gets substantial He Was Right And Listen To Him Next Time points from this incident.)

But it's not just that I can hear better than I could hear a week ago. I can hear better than I have in weeks, perhaps months, quite possibly years. I don't recall ever before noticing that when I speak in the car, there's an echo. I never noticed how many different sounds my keyboard make as I'm typing it. The whole world seems to be at almost too high a volume.

It's surprisingly exciting.

That is all.

6 comments:

  1. Well done and I hope that your good hearing stays. (I wonder why it goes, though? Did the Clinic team have ideas on that?)

    Happy Listening:-)

    cheerio, Anna in Edinburgh

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  2. Hey, Frida! Thank you! It's still feeling like a novelty. :)

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  3. Howdy, Anna! All they had to say was that I have "really small ear canals". Both my parents had/have ear problems, so maybe I've inherited double-misbehaving ears.

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  4. Glad the wind is whistling through your Eustachian tubes again! I don't have "really small ear canals" as far as I know, but am periodically troubled by accretions of wax and have to have my ears syringed. The last time the doctor jet blasted a small boulder of the stuff that was attached, limpet-like, to my ear drum, adding that all the olive oil in the world wouldn't have shifted it. Come to think of it, all the olive oil in the world might have been tricky to apply with that dropper thing I was using.

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  5. Howdy, Vanessa! Yep, all the dropper stuff just wasn't working this time. Actually, I guess that it wasn't thoroughly working before, given the unprecedented level of ear functionality that I'm experiencing. :)

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