Keep Calm and Carry On

1.

Ever since Ms. Gallagher gave us the form of Twitter-structured posts, I have been intending to do one.  This week of small drama about my ear provides me with the opportunity to try it out.

Today I saw a photo of my eardrum for the first time. Not pretty. Source of trouble = a skin cyst. Having a grommet put in on Fri. 12:24 PM Mar 16th

Among those who have ear problems in childhood, explains the specialist, are special people for whom the original difficulties recur in adulthood, although this may not be cause by the earlier problems per se.

The internet tells me that, if left untreated, the skin cyst will consume me and everyone I ever cared about, then rise up like Godzilla to attack the people of Tokyo.  Surgery to remove it, and thereby save the world, looms therefore on the horizon, but first I shall receive the grommet so I can next month fly.

O I should know better than to look up what is wrong with my ear on the internet but there are photos! Of surgery! #cholesteatoma 8:38 PM Mar 16th

I decide that “cholesteatoma” sounds much less unpleasant than “skin cyst”, which describes the same thing, but I keep forgetting the term when I go to use it.

I start to dream of the pressure in my ear being equalised with the grommet, and anticipate with dread the pain of the local anaesthetic.  I visualise myself withstanding it and hope for the best.

I should take heart from the happiness it brought the specialist when I told him he did a great job fixing my sinuses 5 years ago. 8:46PM Mar 16th

I started this journal while recovering from that surgery.  It has otolaryngological origins.  “I have some ambivalence about my new sinuses,” I wrote in just my second entry, “but much less about my new puppy”.

How much do I love Tokyo? Enough to get a hole cut in my eardrum and a ventilation tube put in so I can fly there. 10:40PM Mar 18th

I feel optimistic enough about everything to book my accommodation, and feel excited at the thought of seeing my friends again.

Surgery FAIL. The same again, under general anaesthesia, on Monday. 10:12AM Mar 20th

O thickened eardrum; O narrow ear canal!  It was not, said the specialist, my fault by not being able to keep still, or making unattractive grunting and wailing noises as the grommet failed to penetrate the drum.  I minded most about my failure to keep my cool.  Said the señor: first you try and be staunch like a man, and then when that doesn’t work, you cry like a girl.  The specialist tells me that around thirty percent of attempts of this kind under local don’t work.

Friends on twitter say kind things.

Specialist, anaesthetist and hospital staff tell me it is (another ahem) unusual for my insurer to approve with no probs… 10:43AM Mar 20th

Getting the approval is the easiest part of sorting the paperwork. The staff member says, “Grommets–yeah, I’ll just look at your file–yeah fine.”  At the day surgery office, filling out my forms, I am surrounded by pre-school children waiting for the same operation.  “If you’re very good,” says the surgeon to one, “you can open the surprise cupboard and choose a toy to play with afterwards”.

2.

My hearing is getting worse; twice this week I was nearly bowled by a cyclist whipping round a corner as I stepped out to cross the road at the university.  This is different from having to ask people to repeat themselves in conversation, since I hear no sound at all but just see the cyclist, emerging as if from my imagination.

On Monday I shall be nil-by-mouth at work, including over union lunch with visiting student politicians.  I am tempted to invent a fake reason for why I won’t be eating–Jesus told me not to?  I’m in the middle of a blood feud with the kitchen staff?  Food is for the weak?–but I’ll probably tell them the truth.  I’m sick of talking about it in a professional context, even as I can’t seem to stop explaining myself.

What I dislike the most is the way this small-but-serious-enough problem makes me feel exposed; the rescheduling of classes, the cancelling of meetings, the being-a-patient.  Since I read Terence Wood‘s excellent review of Havi Carel’s Illness (see also Carel’s own article here), I have been thinking a lot about the naturalism/phenomenology ideological distinction or divide in medicine.  As Wood, reading Carel, argues, the naturalistic approach is “insufficient” because “for the sufferer, illness is much more than its physical symptoms alone”.

After I saw that image of my eardrum on Monday I began swimming in memory, thinking about my specific and general vulnerability and the ways in which, as adults, we rationalise away such feelings: I am, after all, having a minor, everyday procedure for entirely purposive reasons, since without this placeholding surgery, I can’t take my holiday in Japan next month.  This problem is in itself a product of my class privilege, and my complaining against it could reasonably be called a white whine, not to mention the fact that I have surgical insurance and can afford thereby to get it fixed privately (assuming the second surgery, which will come later, gets my insurer’s approval).

At the same time, however, I wonder at my increasing deafness, that invasion of the unheimlich when I saw the cyclist whom I hadn’t heard at all, the smiling and nodding I did today at the hairdresser when I couldn’t hear her conversation above the general noise of dryers and chatting about us.  I think about my relative inability to put myself mentally in the hands of another professional, of the way in which more or less every medical interaction reminds me of the wild days of my poor mental health in my late teens (those psychiatric registrars whose care was a mixture of kindness and uncertainty while I sneered at them as if from behind a curtain).  I think about Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” and the considerable suffering of others, but then it’s a function of my depression that I think about the latter (in secret, largely) all the time.

You think too much, says the señor, and you want to know everything.  You’d be happier if you could just go with the flow.  No doubt he’s right, but what, as the saying goes, are you going to do?  My ear pops, and the half-in-half-out grommet remains imperceptible to my senses but present in my imagination, as does the granulated, growing cyst that expands like the roof of a biodome across my eardrum.

Tagged as: cholesteatoma, grommets, myringotomy