Gosh I cannot BELIEVE it is a year TODAY! 1 year ago right now I was about in the middle of my 12 hour surgery - - - - I didn't care - - - - I was sleeping
but my family sure was anxious!
.... I thought it time for an update .... we were away EVERY weekend from May till last weekend – and we headed to our 'summer home away form home' for our Cdn. Thanksgiving to close it for the winter and winterize everything .... now that we’ll be home more I can catch up!
‘Verbal diarrhea’ here I come’ .... I am back to work full-time and have been for some months now. I am generally feeling pretty good but still have residual effects from the surgery. I have severe dry eye (no tears) to which I have to lube all the time - - I have noticed that this week it has gotten much worse due to the weather change and furnaces kicking in again. My face is at about 90% - slight crooked eye and smile (my left eye feels frozen still (bottom lid and just feels 'off') – but people that don’t know me do not notice. I am still suffering from headaches and facial (nerve pain) but this may or may not rectify itself - it is not debilitating - but just 'there' - - it was one heck of a year and still have recovery - but all is going as expected. I have another MRI scheduled for January .... Ick! and then follow-up with Neuro.
I do have complete hearing and vestibular loss on the left and even though this was a small price to pay for such a successful excision of the tumour – but - to be honest - - I cannot get used to it - - I am finding conversation difficult and tend to just not participate anymore since it is too hard to try to hear what people are saying. I am forever saying ‘pardon’ and feel I am burdening people by asking them to repeat themselves all the time. I have been telling people now though that I do have a hearing loss and apologize to them for not ‘understanding’. I am sure that all of us with hearing loss can attest that it is a very different kind of hearing loss more than just not hearing ..... I have no sense of direction and everything ‘meshes’ together – there are no individual sounds anymore. I find noisy environments horrible .... grocery stores, restaurants, the beach, generally anywhere where there are a lot of background noises. If someone is to my left and talking to me – they may as well be talking to a wall - - I consciously have to remember to place myself in a position where I can hear (even one to one conversation) - -
HOWEVER .... on the good side! I have been selected to take part in a trial for a new type of hearing aid being developed RIGHT here in my hometown - - so if this works I will definitely get one – I will be trialing it for a couple of months and this will entail wearing a device behind both my deaf ear and ‘good’ ear - - it will ‘mimic’ like there is sound on the left and give me some sense of direction – some people love these devices and others don’t – I am REALLY excited and really hope this new technology works for me – it will be soooo’ nice to be able to feel a part of things again ...... the only way I can explain the type of hearing loss I have is .... when you fly and you have that plugged, want to pop feeling in your ears - - along with the ever present tintinitus - it’s YUCKY! You feel as if in a padded room with cotton batten shoved in your ears - - I can hear everything 'internal' and the water from a shower hitting my head drives me batty - - it is soooooooo' loud internally - - very frustrating - the kids (especially Brendan) gets upset at times that I have to ask his to repeat himself - Mitchell usually comes right up to my right ear and yells - LOL! The ‘freezing’ – or nerves are now ‘waking’ up on the back of my head - - feels as though all my hair is bent the wrong way (make sense?)
So all in all – I must say I am feeling at at least 99.5% percent better than I was last year at this time – tomorrow
