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| Moving forward during my recent family vacation. |
I have just returned from vacation. Hours ago, I arrived to my home after a week at the beach with my family. That was one vacation. The other break, I realize, is the one I’ve allowed myself from the blog. I feel like I’ve had a lot to say, but sometimes when there is so much going on, it is difficult to focus on a single topic. Instead, I’ve kept my feelings to myself, a decision that has probably stifled my healing as I come to terms with life with the cochlear implant.
Much has happened since I’ve last written. I’m now a contributing writer for two business newspapers and loving it. I’ve also started another job, working three days a week as a community outreach coordinator for a nonprofit organization. The professional opportunities that have come following my surgery not only allow me to do what I love, but I also have much more flexibility than ever before, enabling a greater balance between family and work. Life should be good, and often, I’m stubborn and don’t want to admit that life isn’t as great as I thought it would be at this point post-surgery. My hearing should be improving day by day, little by little.
The truth: I don’t see much improvement, and I’m disappointed by my inability to provide a happy ending to my journey.
I had a week or so when my optimism was growing. A few friends told me they noticed a difference in interacting with me. I felt as though I was getting closer to my goal of understanding noises around me, even if I was slowly crawling to get there.
I’m not sure what has changed in the last three weeks or so, but I feel like a failure. I’ve met with the audiologist, and she knows my concerns. I can hear the sounds, but I still can’t make sense of them.
This past week, my family rented a condo in Ocean City, Maryland with my husband’s siblings and parents; at most, we had a total of fifteen people in the house at one time. This vacation had been planned for months, so I knew prior to surgery that two months after, I’d be at the beach. With so many recipients telling me that they had seen such drastic improvements in three weeks to a month to two months, I was certain this vacation would be amazing.
All my life, I had struggled at the beach. While the ocean breeze and the waves crashing is relaxing background noise for most people, for me it was always the only noise I could hear, masking the speech of those around me and prohibiting me from participating in casual conversation unless I gave my utmost concentration, which of course, I always did, leaving me exhausted and completely un-relaxed.
I had envisioned this vacation at the beach to be different—easy and breezy, for once in my life not having to think about hearing.
Unfortunately, I knew on the first day that I was overwhelmed with all the voices under one roof. I would turn down the volume but it was still loud, and the cacophony of noise remained chaotic and unclear. Hearing-wise, it wasn’t what I had hoped, but also comfort-wise, I was having difficulty. We were fortunate to have beautiful beach weather, but it was HOT, and the processor sat on my sweaty head uncomfortably, leaving me itchy and annoyed, and since I’m unable to get the processor wet, I had to be particularly careful around water. Additionally, my ability to put my hair up in a casual beachy ponytail was not so easy; besides worrying about my physique in a bathing suit, I felt insecure about the mini-computer connected to my head. Not exactly the summer look I was going for.
Bitter emotions bottled up inside me until Day 3 of the vacation when midday I started to feel sick. My stomach hurt and my head ached, and I excused myself to lie down in my dark, air-conditioned bedroom. Jeff came to check on me, questioning if I had “too much sun.” I realized my body was responding to the bitterness I’d been holding in.
Quietly, I admitted what I had been thinking for awhile: “I shouldn’t have got the surgery.” There. I had said it.
Jeff rubbed my back for a minute as I drifted to sleep, actually feeling relieved that I had finally vocalized my fleeting thought, hoping that it would now go away, allowing gratitude and perseverance to guide my thinking from that point forward.
After the declaration to Jeff, I was able to enjoy the trip, even with my crappy hearing and the itchy processor. I decided not to focus on it, and just do the best I can. Most of the time, that meant avoiding conversations and just relaxing on my own—not such a terrible thing at the beach. And sometimes, I didn’t wear the processor at all (I know fellow recipients and my audiologist will not agree with that move, but briefly, ON VACATION, I wanted to forget it existed). Temporarily, I coped.
