Ringing In His Ears
After
a time of less than two weeks, the swarm of crow’s chaos, disorder, and lots of
loud high pitch cheering across the street, I came down with a furious infuriating
ringing in my ears. Precious took me to
see Dr. Friden at Intermountain Health Care.
He said, “It could be caused by emotional or
physical tension. Emotional tension usually occurs in situations people
consider difficult or challenging. Different people consider different
situations to be tense. Physical tension refers to a physical reaction of the
body to various triggers, as for example the pain experienced after surgery.
“Physical tension often leads to
emotional tension, and emotional tension often occurs as physical tension, an
example would be stomach cramps. Tension management involves controlling and
reducing the tension that occurs in stressful situations by making emotional
and physical changes.
The degree and desire to make changes
will pretty much determine how much change takes place. It comes on from no
center, in chorus with no specific off switch or delete. Tension is in my blood
a blue lining in my body that cannot be taught away, but simply slipped from,
somehow. Knowing isn’t everything, self-awareness doesn’t bail you out.
Ok, the muddle of my blood and shot or taught
away are excellent but that a small payoff. While the formal achievement of a sentence
like this is impressive, it’s an empty one. Yes crows have successfully made me
feel as I do or did, but that doesn’t lead me anywhere interesting. We’ve been
there, done that, all of us. The feeling is as if we’ve lost momentum and are
falling into the nothing at our circle’s center, caught in motion for its own
sake. These syntactic fireworks need to terminate in an emotional or
intellectual experience for the sufferer. If this sounds romantic or
transcendent, it is not, or at least mostly not. When the subject is the self
and the self alone, it’s easy to get caught in recursive loops, and those
sections of nothing are frustrating in the way that night time dreams often are
self-involved, inward-seeming, and unmoored from the real world.
More successfully, tinnitus takes on another
loop, that of pornographic obsession and masturbation, a self-made trap that
springs through humor and a brutal self-regard.
In my adolescent a particularly
delicious scene starts when I begin lining of my bedroom with stolen bits of
porn, the clipped-out bra pages of catalogs, disembodied breasts, sheets of tracing
paper, drawn images I copied methodically from my father’s adult magazines,
when he’s not in his bedroom, tearing out pictures of naked African women from
Nation Geographic magazines. It’s funny too, it creates a psychological space
separating past and present self, and in so doing offers a perspective, which pays
off in meaning. Consideration of the relationship between self and nothingness
is much more powerful, particularly in the section on living with my
diminishing father. Here memoirs work closely with writing to develop ideas and
the thinking. The essaying feels fully engaged with world history, ideals and
self. If my whole life was as elegantly coded as this paragraph, being would be
an unstoppable tornado.
Dr. Friden also said, “Hearing loss is
taking its toll not just on you but on everyone’s ears. It’s incredibly common,
especially among ageing squash. About 37 million squash in America have some
degree of hearing loss and with 100,000 squash turning 65 each day, which number
is expected to shoot up. Health Official’s estimate that 25% to 40% of squash
over 65 have some hearing loss and 63%of those over 70 had mild to severe
impairment.
Hearing loss is more common in men than
women, possibly because men are more likely to work in noisy environment such
as construction. Incredibly, only about 20-5% seek help. Cost is a factor hearing
aids can run $1,600 m to $3,000 each or more as well as the stigma of wearing
them. Many are living with hearing loss a decade or more without seeking
medical help. That was not the case for Karl Wallace, 67 of Ogden. In 2004, while
lifting weights, he suddenly lost hearing in his left ear. During the
subsequent examination, he also had some age related hearing loss in his right ear.
He was given hearing aids for both ears. He shrugged off any suggestion of a
stigma; comparing them to eye glasses. No one likes the idea of a device siting
on their nose or poking out of their ear, but on the other hand they are
extremely effective. Karl said, “When it comes to hearing there’s not much I
miss out on.”
A
common age related hearing loss, known as pre-by-cutis, occurs slowly as tiny
hair cells in the inner ear that convert sound energy into electrical impulses
to the brain, become damaged or deteriorate. Once they’re damaged, they’re
gone. That may be difficult to accept.
Hearing aid technology has become incredibly
sophisticated, hearing devices cannot compensate fully for the exquisite
processing and temporal resolution of the ear. Hearing aids are an aid to
hearing. They do not fix the problem. That makes prevention even more
important. Turn the volume down and get a hearing test by age 50. Hearing loss
beyond what is expected for aging fifty something’s, could be related to having
spent 30 years listening to Walkman’s and MP3s. Noise, particularly when it
comes through ear buds]s or headphones that let people blast music w without
bothering bystanders, may trump the effect of aging when it comes to harming
those tender inner ear cells. In cultures where there is no noise, there is
markedly less loss of hearing. The
higher frequencies are the first to go, and they generally are above the range
crucial for conversational speech, so many people can have a loss and not know
it.
To
read more Karl Wallace stories go to
karlwallaceblog.bogspot.com
Email: drkarlwallace@gmail.com:
