What the MRI machine knows: surprises and vulnerability

October 27, 2017 Susan Arico

With the body, there is vulnerability.

We live as if we weren't fragile beings, a mass of cells held together by the frame of our body. We live as if our pulsing heartbeat, our expanding lungs were normal, right, a foregone conclusion. As if we crafted our bodies and ourselves set them to pace out their days.

Oh, but it is intricate. It is complex. It is elaborate - more than we can imagine. And none of it our own doing.

We pay the body so little heed (except to track its appearance with an oft-critical eye)... until something goes wrong. Then suddenly we're all attention. The soft, intricate machine encasing our soul has sprung some kind of glitch, and we fixate on the problem.

And this is where the vulnerability slides in - when our body misbehaves. For we cannot heal ourselves. We often cannot even know, ourselves, exactly what's going wrong, or why it's going wrong. We need experts - exams and tests and resources. We are dependent. We are humbled.

The hearing test room: vulnerability and reward

July 14, 2017 Susan Arico

In the hearing test room, you close your eyes once the headphones go on. You quiet your breathing, you try to not even breathe. You strain to listen, striving to be present for each beep. You raise your hand as the sounds come, sometimes confidently and sometimes waveringly, as if your hand would say, "I *think* I heard that beep, but I'm not positive."

The beeps start in your good ear, and you breeze through. Then onto your bad ear, and the stress seeps soundlessly in. You know you're missing some of the beeps, but you try your hardest not to... willing yourself to hear what you can't hear.

Vulnerability meets you in the hearing test room. It's a place where the depth of your weakness is plumbed. A place where your shortcoming is measured, known, revealed.

You emerge at the end with a paper to show-and-tell the doctor, a series of falling dots and lines in bright colours. You bring it, like an offering, into the examination room.

The hearing test: part of my life. I've done it dozens of times in the past year and a half, and I know just what to expect. Before I enter the room I anticipate the procedure and the emotions it will bring: the strained effort, the subtle sense of defeat, the quiet resignation at the end. I had an audiogram this week before my surgery, and the whole cycle ran itself through.

One year with hearing loss: what I've learned

March 23, 2017 Susan Arico

A little over a year ago, my left ear went rogue. It started ringing and didn't stop... and it turned out to be nerve damage. Permanent nerve damage, that created permanent hearing loss. So now I wear a hearing aid, and I will for the rest of my life.

There's an organization called The Mighty that builds community around issues of disability and disease, and last week they published my story: "What I would tell myself a year after experiencing sudden hearing loss." In the piece I lay out some basic information about the kind of hearing loss I have, sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL), and provide a few practical takeaways. The biggest takeaway is that if I'd acted earlier, I might have been able to get my hearing restored.

What the article doesn't cover are the emotional/spiritual aspects of the journey, and if your viewpoint is anything like mine, those facets are sometimes the most interesting. I wrote my first post about my ear debacle, "A Definition of Suffering (and my gimp ear)," in the thick of the experience- just a few weeks after I'd started wearing my hearing aid. And "What, now THIS? Dealing with disappointment" came six months later, just after I'd discovered that a surgical attempt to correct (a different component of) my hearing loss had been unsuccessful. The soul wrestle comes out more in those.

What, now THIS? Dealing with disappointment

November 29, 2016 Susan Arico

Here's a quirky fact tidbit about me: I have a broken inner ear bone. You remember them, the "bones of hearing," from sixth grade science, right - the anvil, hammer, and stirrup? Smallest bones in the body? Well the top of my stirrup bone clean broke off, most random thing. The doctors I was seeing couldn't figure it out for the longest time... most because they'd never seen anything like it before.

In August I had ear surgery so the doctor could look at the thing close up and try to repair it. It was my first time going under. My husband was far away; he'd already been in our new homeland of Crete for nearly two months. Our decision for me to undergo surgery pushed my kids' and my departure to join him out by nearly another month. It was all a little intense.

The post-surgery report was good; the doctor thought he'd been able to fix it. He couldn't tell for sure because, like I said, I'm pretty much the only person ever to have this kind of bizarreness in my ear. And because full healing takes time, and I was trying to hop the first plane to Crete, since our kids were already missing the beginning of school. But my symptoms were vastly improved; it seemed successful. When I flew to Crete three weeks afterwards, it was a rosy scenario. "Phew," I thought. "So glad to have gotten that dealt with before delving into this new adventure on Crete."

What's Greek for "lower your expectations"?

August 28, 2016 Susan Arico

We had this recurring conversation, that first July week - the week before he flew to Crete. "If we can just get everything done and settled, we could have a little bit of relaxed time before I go," he said. It never happened.. and I'd kinda known it wouldn't. Because there were lost items to find, insurance to change, random stacks of papers to sort, suitcases to pack. It seemed a hopeless hope to think there might be quiet stretches in the days before he left. An international move for a family of six, right after selling and vacating your house, doesn't go down like that.

I smiled inwardly at him when he'd said it, those weeks ago, and now I smile at myself. Or try to.

A definition for suffering (and my gimp ear)

June 1, 2016 Susan Arico

"The word 'suffering' is much too grand to apply to most of our troubles, but if we don't learn to refer the little things to God how shall we learn to refer the big ones? A definition which covers all sorts of trouble, great or small, is this: having what you don't want, or wanting what you don't have." ~Elisabeth Elliott

It started with dizziness. I was at the stove, that daily companion of moms everywhere, chopping something or other when a light wave of unsteadiness washed over me. Weird, I thought. It passed, and I carried on. I made appointments a day or two later as the little dizziness episodes recurred - urgent care for a blood draw, my naturopath, my primary care doc. By then I was dealing with fatigue too, unusual for me, and some ringing in one ear. Anemia, I thought, or maybe something's off with my thyroid. I felt rough - lying on the couch in the afternoons, slumpy - but no fever or rash, and not even a sniffle or cough. Something mild, I wagered.

Blood results were normal; I got on some supplements and figured I'd even out before long. There was a couple-week wait before I could get into the ENT, which my primary care had advised. By the time the appointment came, my symptoms were all gone (hallelujah!) except the ringing in my left ear. It was louder and ever-present. In fact, this tinnitus was a complete nuisance. I took a hearing test, took steroids for 10 days, went in for an MRI. Then I and my ringing ear went back to see the gentle, red-haired ear doctor - about my age - with the bow tie.

The MRI came back normal, he said; the steroids had done nothing. "You have sensineural hearing loss; it's moderate in the high ranges," the doctor told me. "Your nerves have been damaged, probably by some kind of virus but there's no way to know for sure. There's nothing we can do for this kind of hearing loss. Your ear's ringing because your brain's creating its own sound as a substitute for what it's not hearing anymore." Then: "But I think a hearing aid would probably help your tinnitus."

Wait, what? This is permanent? And -- a hearing aid? It was hard to take in. I'd turned 40 two weeks before the dizziness spells started. Early onset hearing loss was nowhere in the picture when I'd blown out the candles on my fourth decade of life.

But our move to Crete was getting closer by the day, and the timing of My Ear Situation pressed a bit. I wasted no time in calling insurance, figuring out hearing aid coverage, booking the fitting appointment. And my aggravating ear - a tape recorder playing tinny feedback, the one cassettes used to play when the music was done but a little tape was left - rang on, ever louder as the day wore on. And now the ear felt kind of asleep too, almost pins-and-needles. If a hearing aid could right the thing, I figured, then onward.

The afternoon I sat with the sweet hearing aid specialist, a woman younger than me with the kindest demeanor you could ask for, I felt the realness. "So if it helps me, then I'll wear a hearing aid for the rest of my life?" I asked her. The tears welled a bit, unexpected and unbidden. "Yes," she said. So this is my gimp ear then, I thought. For life.

It's been three weeks, and the aid does help. It reduces the weird, numb-ish feeling of my ear by about half, and it makes my tinnitus about 30% better. (Assessment sound pretty exact? What can I say... that's how we relentlessly evaluative types roll.) A hearing aid brings my symptoms, more or less, to manageable. And that's certainly something. I'm grateful.

But it's not everything. It's not, for example, going back to early February when my ear worked fine. It's not a normal ear. It's not the bliss of silence, when no sound's present. It's not a day without working to ignore an irritant that's pretty darn irritating. And truth be told, that's what I'd really like: to go back to my pre-February ear. That's the pure, boiled-down essence of regret, isn't it? I want it back. But I don't get that option.

The situation could be a thousand times worse, of course. For many whom I know and love, the situation is worse - in some cases it's way worse. Forever I tell my kids when they cry "unfair!" (37 times a day on average) that they must view their lots alongside those less fortunate than theirs, not just alongside those that in the moment seem more fortunate. Because isn't this what we humans do, by default? Feel self-pity. See ourselves as the unfortunate ones, with no regard for the contrary evidence. Lament our pale grass alongside our neighbor's deep green. Whereas the truth, the one I walk my kids through, is that we're so rich in blessings we can't even hold them all; we're receivers of grace upon grace. And more: the hard things are the ones that ultimately grow us most and bring us closest to the God who himself came to be suffering servant. And they're the things he often uses in surprising ways to bring light into the world.

Even so. It's no good trying to talk oneself quickly out of discouragement over a genuine loss, no matter that greater losses abound. The real question is: how will I respond to unexpected trouble? What will I do when a real difficulty, one I didn't see coming and turns out to be permanent, knocks at my door? First up's gotta be, I think, a reckoning of the trouble, a willingness to take stock and let the emotions come out and show themselves. This is where the psalmist's words, the writer of Lamentations, the sighers of humanity - they train us. They remind that God isn't surprised by the dismay we feel when we encounter life's troubles; he doesn't condemn us for it. In fact, he's right there alongside us in all of it - the discovery of the issue, the struggle and emotions that accompany adjustment, the growth that eventually comes as surrender unfolds.

Elisabeth Elliott's words have always calmed me, the plain acknowledgement of base-level suffering. It's a healthy starting point for referring things to God: I have what I don't want, and I want what I don't have. For me: I have a gimp ear. We'll start there.