While not strictly the domain of Father Winter, colds seem to mosey about more in his season. And a cold, specifically a head cold, is exacerbated by hearing aids. With something jammed into my ear, a stuffy nose, an inflamed sinus cavity, makes for a dizzy Brad. Sometimes I just have to take the damn things out. The aids, not the sinus cavity. Although…
The virus always starts in my throat. It commences the attack with a feather. A tickle in my throat is the first sign that ill-tidings have arrived. Then it freezes said feather and my throat goes cold, only to thaw out as swallowing becomes a wee bit unpleasant. Then that damned thing defies gravity. The next stop of the choo-choo train of sickness is up in my head. It tears through my sinuses, its smokestacks leaving a fog of phlegm in its wake. And when the sinuses become inflamed, my moldings become tools of the devil.
Where Julie feels ear pain, my head feels overfilled and I’m even more prone to dizziness. Everytime I swallow, my ears crackle and my moldings shift uncomfortably. I feel like a Bobblehead. But in the stead of being an airhead, I’m a cement head. My inflamed sinuses push against both my eyes, giving me a touch of a headache, and my ears, giving me a bit of an earache. That last is a special kind of ache; with the sinuses pushing against my eardrum from within and my moldings pushing against my eardrum from without, there’s an ever-present pinching pain in my ears.
On those rare occasions when I don’t cater to my Puritanical work ethic and actually call in sick, I just take the damned things out. But I’ve been working full-time since I was 17. And the unhealthy corporate American edict to never call in has taken hold of me. I’m sure my coworkers love it when I bring my virus-riddled self into work. It makes everyone’s jobs harder. They don’t want to come too close, rightly so, but I need to be even closer to hear. With the cold camping out in my head voices sound like they’re whispered into a tin can, from under a blanket with the speaker facing away from me. And any phone conversations are completely beyond my auditory ken. Fortunately, I don’t get sick often. (Quick! Everyone knock on wood with me!) But the last time I did wasn’t too long ago. And, wonder of wonders, I actually did call in. Which means I was able to do what I said at the beginning of this paragraph. I went a day without my bionic ears.
Hello there, tinnitus.
Yeah, so, taking out my ears relieved some physical pressure but augmented some mental pressure. Without my bionic ears amplifying sound, muffled though it may be, my tinnitus rings out more clearly. I normally have a podcast or music streaming from my phone to my bionic ears. But I have a Bose speaker that I can crank to mask the tinnitus. But I spend a goodly part of the day watching binging TV. While I turn up the volume louder than I could if I lived in an apartment complex, I still can’t make out all of the words. Thank Yoda for closed captions. The muffled sounds from the boob tube mask a bit of the tinnitus but it’s still there. It’s something I have to actively ignore.
Speaking of active…
I have to bring my active listening to bear (roar) on TV now. Since things are so muffled, it’s a bit more of a strain to make out what’s being spoken. You’d think I’d simply sit back and let the captions fill me in. But active listening is a way of life. It’s something I need to do to get through the day. It’s not something I can turn off. So I would take breaks from TV and read. Which, takes the mask off the tinnitus. So I’d put on some instrumental music, like Miles Davis, to slap that mask back on. I can read to music but not if it has vocals. My mind would do that active listening thing again and try to make out what the lyrics are.
Hard of hearing colds
Are doubly exhausting.
Inside and outside. Inside and outside.
Leave a Reply