I DON'T KNOW if I can post an essay but we'll see. I wrote this a couple of weeks ago. Just a personal essay- with embellishments (the spinning, crickets, and neon are real!). I'm sure a lot of you can relate. I'm not going crazy but could understand someone going that way.
Short Circuit---
Do you want to hear something? Funny way to start a tale to be told by a person with muted and compromised hearing. But I have to tell it, I need to talk about it because that might be the only thing that I can do with it. YOU definitely can't hear it, although maybe you have your own to attend to. It's really sad, but to give it attention seems to be the only thing that one has to do with it and at the same time what one doesn't want to do with it. I used to be able to ignore it, but it has always been insidious, always around, sneaking up on me. Now it seems to wake me or it just waits for me to wake up in the depths of the night. I know that it doesn't just start then, it's always present. It is there when my head hits the pillow. That pillow which has been my sanctuary lately, the greatest comfort that I have now since my dizzys started. So relaxing, floaty, but then when everything should be quiet, and I'm finally close to the peace that I need so much, it's there. Emanating from the depths of my head, it's there. And that's what I'm writing about, that is why I am up at 3 in the morning with the TV on to mask it or try and make go away. Like the tell tale heart it's getting to me.
This tumor could have helped by possibly deadening it, but it is apparently the devils intrusion. Instead of displaying a fleck of worth, it has toyed with me, tweaked things in bad ways. I imagine it is squeezing it and, just my luck, has decided to change things for the worst. I was hoping that writing, thinking, would distract me but the distraction only seems to amplify.
It's the sound. Used to be a subtle buzzing coming from deep inside my ear. Somebody called it tinnitus but that is just medical jargon to put a word on a phenomenon that no one can explain. As I confided in my neurologist how bad it has gotten since this tumor has taken residence, he explained that it was my inner workings. That was his whole explanation! How could my body possibly want to go against me with such vengeance? I think that it's electrical, and that explains it; this tumor has skewered my electrical signals, maybe by crossing or clogging synapses. But it has been with me seemingly forever, I can't remember being without it although I know that I didn't grow up with it. But before this tumor, it was tolerable, now it has morphed. Maybe my electrical circuits are shorting, I'm certain that's what's happening in that ear. Also, used to be that the noise of the world would mask it, but not a chance now. It's constant buzzing, even a higher pitch than before. So curious when I can't really hear high pitches that others discern as real but I have them coming from within! Sometimes when my head is spinning, my squeal is spinning with it. Sometimes it is like an incredibly high pitched cricket, chirping on and off with no apparent cadence, nothing to make sense of it. Sometimes it's like neon, radiating throughout that side of my brain. Lately it's always changing, electrons sparking out of control, and it's all a malicious trick the tumor is playing on me. Now as I write it is deafening and seems to be splashing over onto the left side of my brain, my good side. My last refuge. That's its mode of operation, its reason for being, it wants to drive me crazy. rb
