One of These Days...

...I'm gonna cut and run.

Weather? Grey and raining. Again. We've had one nice day in the past week or so, which is just wrong. I'm a different person in the sunshine -- it does me a world of good. In this weather, I get pretty ho-hum about things, really.

Healthwise, I keep thinking I'm getting better, and then I slip right back again. Again with the headache, again with the reduced hearing. It's frustrating. I have this fear deep down inside that one day I'll lose my hearing entirely. Considering I haven't much to begin with, that's a possibility. When I was a kid, there was all this talk of surgically correcting hearing, and how much they felt they would be able to do. "By the time you're an adult," they'd say, "everything will have changed."

I'm 32, and nothing much has changed. Hearing aids are digital now, and the people in the know seem to believe that these digital hearing aids are the bomb. Nope, not really. They're not very different at all, to tell the truth. The sound quality's the same, the volume's worse, and there are still fit issues.

There's probably nothing I hate more about life than my hearing loss. Not that I hate life by any stretch, but I really hate not being able to hear to the same degree as others. When I go to bed at night, the aids come out, and I'm virtually deaf. I'm used to that. Single, it's fine. There are pluses to it in a relationship, because if he was a snorer, I'd never know. Great. But there's a lot to be said for hearing the rise and fall of a lover's breath, or being able to have your ears licked and nibbled and sucked, which I can't really have happen, and I really wish I could. With bangs and crashes, those I can sometimes hear. Smoke alarm? Not a chance. There's a standing order with my landlady, that if there's ever a fire, the first thing she does is to come and get me. This is where sleeping naked might be awkward, but hey.

I cannot express how frustrating this recent compromising of my hearing has been. It's scary, it's awkward, it's affecting all my relationships in my life, and it's affecting my livelihood in every way possible. My writing, I bet, would improve if I had better hearing. I suppose it's why I'm good at description but have so limited range sometimes... I can't eavesdrop conversations, and the few I've overheard in my life have always given me great fodder. I can count on two hands, probably the number of whole conversations I've overheard, because the nature of a hearing loss is that you can't hear what's behind you.

I'm just frustrated that I'm making so little progress with getting my hearing back in my right ear, and have more than three weeks to wait until I see a specialist. Every time I think my hearing might be improving, it's either just for a half hour or hour, or else I realize the other hearing aid hasn't been turned up enough, which is a big kick to the pride.

My mother always raised me to believe I didn't have any challenges, I wasn't handicapped, etc. Well, for the first time in my life, I'm feeling like I am. I've been injured, I've been badly overweight in the past, I've had a lot of adversities, and this is the first time I've ever felt handicapped.

I was out with the Guy last weekend and sitting with his friends and stuff like that, and normally, I'd just say, "Hey, I'm having trouble hearing, can you speak up?" but for some reason, I couldn't fucking do it. I was so damned sick of feeling like a special case that I just disappeared from the conversation. I still feel like I was incredibly rude and very unlike myself, but I'm only now realizing how frustrated all of this has left me feeling. I've been hoping it was getting better, but it keeps getting well and then reverting back to the same old shit. I don't know how much longer I can put up with it, and I hope like hell I solve the problem soon.

I've realized that dairy is affecting the problem, for some fucked-up reason, and I LOVE dairy so I'm having a hard time letting it go. I also took my asthma medicine for the first time in a long time this morning and realized I was momentarily better after that, so maybe it's an asthma/respiratory-tract problem that has induced the sinus infection, which has caused the ear thing. Fuck, man. It's not like it's ONE thing I need to solve, it's like this interconnected web of fuctedness that needs to be resolved on some obscure level before everything else will respond. I'm demanding an allergy test at my next appointment, so hopefully I can find out if I really am allergic to dairy or what the deal is. (Only 15% of sinusitis cases are supposed to be exacerbated by dairy. I want cheese! I want ice cream! This sucks.)

I'm not depressed about life; I feel like everything else will come together as it's supposed to, but right now, this is drastically affecting my ability to enjoy people's company. I'm EMBARRASSED to not hear what's being said. I'm EMBARRASSED to have to say "Pardon?" every three seconds. I feel like a fucking special-case with a learning disability or something. My hearing loss has NEVER made me feel this way before. I'm fucking sick of it.

Where's that magic "all-better" button when you need it, huh? I just want to enjoy people again and have my clarity back.

Naturally, this is a day where I have to see a lot of people, so I guess part of the reason for the posting is because I'm filled with dread about how much fill-in-the-blank guesswork I have to do about all the things I *know* I won't be hearing.

And as negative as I know this posting must sound, I do believe I'll get back to some level of normalcy soon, but it's imperative that SOON be the operative word. And I believe a major lifestyle change is in order to accomplish it -- no more dairy, no more swimming for awhile, major focus on asthma irritants, blah fucking blah. I don't want to change my lifestyle; I'm a creature of routine. It's hard. And I'm impatient. Sigh. Whatever.

It's killing my mood to write for the other blog, though. It's hard to feel sexy and write about sex when you're secretly feeling like a handicapped loser who's not plugged into the world at all. Frustrating. I need to fight this, but like I say, it's hard to fight sometimes. That's all.