A mutual side-eyed glance transitioned to us facing one another at nearly eye level for a change (due to me standing on a high bench) – both of us sodden, downtrodden, on sensory overload, and chilled to the bone.
We had words.
Julie: “Someday this will be funny…” (cautiously hopeful in tone while barely suppressing a complete meltdown)
Brad: “Someday…but today is not that day…” (even tempered, reasonable, encouraging and also barely suppressing a complete meltdown)
It was all my fault.
As usual.
Our Misty Mountain Hop blog recounting was our first foray into the rain, and truly belongs in the collection housed at the “Things Julie Comes Up With and Things Brad Somehow Goes Along With Hall of Fame”.
This latest experience out in the rain has earned the top spot.
(As of this writing, I think we’re still speaking)
It started off – as most things do – with the absolute best of intentions. An invitation extended to attend a Boston College football game – the quintessential activity of a crisp New England afternoon. There were promises of beer, delicious food, gothic towers, fantastic company, and – of course – the excitement of watching BC trounce an opponent on the home field. All of the days leading up to game day were sunny, breezy, with a hint of the anticipated shift to “sweatshirt weather”.
Naturally, in the days approaching game day, the skies had other plans – in the form of a torrential, unrelenting, deluge of rain. All day. All night.
Did this deter your faithful writer of this blog? Of course not.
Should it? Absolutely.
Will she ever learn? Nope.
For those that have been along on the blog journeys of “Hearing Things with Julie and Brad”- you may recall our rallying cry when it comes to water anywhere near our hearing aids: “WATER IS THE ENEMY!”.
We were solidly in enemy territory.
It started out with me working through the stages of grief as it relates to the weather – abject denial that it’s actually raining, transitioning to sadness that the sun is not coming out, followed up with irrational anger and raging at the sky and ending with acceptance that this has devolved into a living hell in the form of endless rain.
Undeterred, we moved ahead and took in the sights of the always gorgeous Boston College campus no matter the weather, and landed at the Lane family tailgate site. We were relegated to wearing the hoods attached to our sweatshirt (Brad) and raincoat (Julie) to protect our “bionic ears”, to borrow a term from Brad – which, while absolutely necessary, were cumbersome, restricting and upsetting to our sensory systems.
The hearing aid microphones are incredibly sensitive and the slightest bit of interference be it noises, dust or material coming close to the apparatus will set off screeching feedback at a pitch that I (unfortunately) can still hear. The wearing of a hood for extended periods – especially when you don’t have the option to remove it due to the very real possibility of damaging your hearing aids – is nearly intolerable in its feelings of claustrophobia. A hood minimizes my peripheral vision which adds another exhaustive level of already struggling to hear – I rely on my forward and peripheral vision to inform me of my environment. The removal of a skill set that is necessary to my overall functioning, safety and comfort level – especially in a crowded, public setting – added to an already increasing level of anxiety of how I was going to enjoy the tailgate and football game when I was put in an even more compromised situation than normal day-to-day life experiences. Add to this that I am 5’ 4” tall with a small head – which results in a gigantic hood that falls forward over my face, adding insult to injury.
We continued on, determined to make the best of this situation (I plied Brad with Sam Adams Octoberfest to keep him sort-of on my side in this mess).
Fortunately, there was a canopy set up at the tailgate site which gave us brief pauses from the rain and also allowed us to remove our hoods for a short period without fear of rain seeping into our “bionic ears”. The removal of the hood…to describe it to someone that has never experienced this whilst wearing hearing aids…is, simply put, euphoric. That first blast of cool air hitting the previously covered sides of your face, the world coming to life again in all of its cacophony of sounds – I finally felt like I could exhale. For a few brief moments, I was able to engage in conversation with friends and family and felt as close to “typical” as I ever will as a hearing aid user in the midst of an endless stream of rain. As the afternoon bore on, I started to take little risks with venturing out sans hood. As with most things in my life, I will push that envelope a little further each time – soon, I was trotting around for longer than I really should have with my hood off, reveling in the freedom I felt while rolling the figurative dice of my hearing aids sustaining significant and likely permanent damage.
While I was frolicking in the rain, I had no idea that I was simultaneously giving Brad a small cardiac event each time he glimpsed my hood down. At one point, I went swirling by on my way to greet friends and was gently reminded to put my hood up. Ironically, I was spending a good portion of the afternoon in a mild panic about how Brad was going to stay dry during the game where there was no canopy and he was clad only in a sweatshirt that was somewhat water resistant without a raincoat. We reached a compromise – my hood stays up, he puts on a poncho with an extra hood just in case.
Finally, reason ruled the day, and we retreated to the warm and dry confines of the truck while the game finished in our absence. The shelter provided the permanent removal of the hood for the evening – a return to the feeling of bliss, but the side effect of having a hood on for an extended period, especially in a very loud environment like a football stadium, is that it creates a vibrating effect in my ears and my brain, which does not subside quickly. For lack of a better descriptor, it feels like someone comes up behind me with cymbals, smashes them behind me, and the reverberations continue…and continue…and continue. Brad and I traded one relief of the burden of the hood for another burden of the ongoing reverberations and our brains feeling transformed to something akin to scrambled eggs. Our eyes were tired, our backs and feet weary, our senses were on high alert and we were the heady mix of being both hyper and exhausted at the same time.
It was a lot.
I am glad that we went to a BC football game, and that Brad got to see the love of my life (Boston College, obviously) in person. But next time? Even the faintest threat of rain will find us enjoying the game somewhere else, anywhere else, and definitely not outside!
(And I know you’re wondering if I kept my hood on for the rest of the night and if Brad trusted me to keep up my end of the bargain – Well…Shortly after this picture was taken, the presence of two large hands behind me abruptly wrestling my sweatshirt hood and my rain coat hood on top of my head answers that question…)
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