music and hearing II
The following is an account of one musician's loss of hearing, and journey to cochlear implants which is only now coming to fruition.
We go back to Lubbock, Texas sometime around 2015, when around the same time I was experiencing the peak of my music career and also the first of many dizzy spells.
Musically I was about as happy as I could be. I had a group of friends who played serious bluegrass, and I was their fiddler, and was learning a number of great songs and experiencing the joy of producing what you want to hear, and others want to hear. I couldn't get enough of it. I wanted them to perform, but the banjo picker, best I've ever heard, didn't want to. "Been there done that," he'd said. Just playing dixie songs, fast and true, that was enough for them.
Lubbock did not have high altitude, though it was dry and the wind could have affected my allergies. In any case my first dizzy spell really knocked me back. I'd gotten a speeding ticket, going 31 in a school zone, but the flashing sign which said "school zone 20 when flashing" was broken, therefore I was angry and planning to appeal the ticket. The problem was that even 31 was one mph over, but keep in mind, the ticket was about two hundred (though you could take an online course and, having paid the money, have it expunged from your record) - and in my mind it was unjust.
Right before I went to the municipal office I went to an academing hors d'oevres party of some kind, of which I don't remember much, except that not having had lunch, I ate too much processed goodies there, before finding my way over to the municipal office to deal with the ticket.
Walking into the municipal office, which was a grim building with a window behind bars to protect them from angry people like me, I started staggering because the ground beneath my feet started swirling and falling out from beneath me. A classic, strong, dizzy spell. I felt like I couldn't even walk a straight line so I just paid the fine, signed up for the course, and hightailed it out of there. At home I threw up. This was a feature of dizzy spells. Somehow they are connected to triggering nausea and you hurl whatever is in there.
I didn't have a whole lot more dizzy spells in Texas and soon we moved to New Mexico, where we'd live at 9000 feet and I would teach in a junior high at 3000 feet. The dizzy spells would ultimately come on fast and furious and would really set me back.
When I finally got out to see an ENT in Roswell a few years later, he said to me something like this:
Look, the inner ear is an organ, like the kidney or the liver. It has a very complex setup and its entire job is to sort the sodium from the potassium in a stream of fluid. If it fails your inner ear becomes flooded with fluid and that damages your ear. Maniere's disease is a condition of having damaged hearing due to this flooding. We prescribe two things: a very low sodium diet, and a diuretic, which is a pill that will make it hard for you to retain water. You will need to pee a lot and you will have less water in your system. But we prescribe these things because they work, they help, not because they cure it. We don't know how to cure it. We only know how to treat it, or what helps.
By the time I had seen that ENT I'd had dozens of dizzy spells, and had spent nights with my ears full of fluid, and the CPAP and my wife's sound machine damaging the ear as it sat there waterlogged.
I have since tried to picture the inner ear trying to sort sodium and potassium in a world of potato chips or other sodium-laden things; obviously my inner ear was overwhelmed more than once and just gave up, thus leaving me with waterlogged ears for days at a time. There went my hearing. Most of this was at New Mexico, at 9000 feet, or at 7800 which was the next place we lived, pretty high up there. But I can't attribute the problem to high altitude entirely, because it started in Lubbock, very clearly.
Coffee, he told me, has a correlation with Maniere's. Pressure - the difference in air pressure between high and low - can also be important. In those days I'd notice when I'd go down the hill and my ears wouldn't pop. They were supposed to. It was a natural defense against the pressure difference. And you know how things sound muffled, quieter, when they don't pop? They began sounding that way to me all the time. My hearing was getting away from me. I started studying sodium content in foods, doing what he said, doing what I could to alleviate it, but for the most part, it was too late.
We go back to Lubbock, Texas sometime around 2015, when around the same time I was experiencing the peak of my music career and also the first of many dizzy spells.
Musically I was about as happy as I could be. I had a group of friends who played serious bluegrass, and I was their fiddler, and was learning a number of great songs and experiencing the joy of producing what you want to hear, and others want to hear. I couldn't get enough of it. I wanted them to perform, but the banjo picker, best I've ever heard, didn't want to. "Been there done that," he'd said. Just playing dixie songs, fast and true, that was enough for them.
Lubbock did not have high altitude, though it was dry and the wind could have affected my allergies. In any case my first dizzy spell really knocked me back. I'd gotten a speeding ticket, going 31 in a school zone, but the flashing sign which said "school zone 20 when flashing" was broken, therefore I was angry and planning to appeal the ticket. The problem was that even 31 was one mph over, but keep in mind, the ticket was about two hundred (though you could take an online course and, having paid the money, have it expunged from your record) - and in my mind it was unjust.
Right before I went to the municipal office I went to an academing hors d'oevres party of some kind, of which I don't remember much, except that not having had lunch, I ate too much processed goodies there, before finding my way over to the municipal office to deal with the ticket.
Walking into the municipal office, which was a grim building with a window behind bars to protect them from angry people like me, I started staggering because the ground beneath my feet started swirling and falling out from beneath me. A classic, strong, dizzy spell. I felt like I couldn't even walk a straight line so I just paid the fine, signed up for the course, and hightailed it out of there. At home I threw up. This was a feature of dizzy spells. Somehow they are connected to triggering nausea and you hurl whatever is in there.
I didn't have a whole lot more dizzy spells in Texas and soon we moved to New Mexico, where we'd live at 9000 feet and I would teach in a junior high at 3000 feet. The dizzy spells would ultimately come on fast and furious and would really set me back.
When I finally got out to see an ENT in Roswell a few years later, he said to me something like this:
Look, the inner ear is an organ, like the kidney or the liver. It has a very complex setup and its entire job is to sort the sodium from the potassium in a stream of fluid. If it fails your inner ear becomes flooded with fluid and that damages your ear. Maniere's disease is a condition of having damaged hearing due to this flooding. We prescribe two things: a very low sodium diet, and a diuretic, which is a pill that will make it hard for you to retain water. You will need to pee a lot and you will have less water in your system. But we prescribe these things because they work, they help, not because they cure it. We don't know how to cure it. We only know how to treat it, or what helps.
By the time I had seen that ENT I'd had dozens of dizzy spells, and had spent nights with my ears full of fluid, and the CPAP and my wife's sound machine damaging the ear as it sat there waterlogged.
I have since tried to picture the inner ear trying to sort sodium and potassium in a world of potato chips or other sodium-laden things; obviously my inner ear was overwhelmed more than once and just gave up, thus leaving me with waterlogged ears for days at a time. There went my hearing. Most of this was at New Mexico, at 9000 feet, or at 7800 which was the next place we lived, pretty high up there. But I can't attribute the problem to high altitude entirely, because it started in Lubbock, very clearly.
Coffee, he told me, has a correlation with Maniere's. Pressure - the difference in air pressure between high and low - can also be important. In those days I'd notice when I'd go down the hill and my ears wouldn't pop. They were supposed to. It was a natural defense against the pressure difference. And you know how things sound muffled, quieter, when they don't pop? They began sounding that way to me all the time. My hearing was getting away from me. I started studying sodium content in foods, doing what he said, doing what I could to alleviate it, but for the most part, it was too late.
posted by tom at 11:22 AM
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