Life After Deaf

by Noel Holston

  We eventually found ourselves checking into a slightly sooty franchise built cheek to jowl with a freeway cloverleaf seventeen miles from the hospital. I could not hear the ceaseless whoosh of cars. Marty could. We got no pool time. After a tense cruising of the nearby strip malls, we ended up eating dinner at about 9:30 p.m. at a fast-food restaurant. Back at the motel, we collapsed into bed so exhausted we were barely able to undress.

  Wake-up time—4:30 a.m.—came painfully early for both of us. At least I had the comfort of knowing I would soon be getting anesthesia.

  I wasn’t especially nervous. I hadn’t had surgery since I had my tonsils removed in my Mississippi hometown when I was eight. It left no traumatic memories. I recall somebody putting a mask over my face, the smell of a chemical, and the words “Count backwards from ten.” I only got as far as eight before a peaceful pitch-blackness enveloped me. And afterward, when I awoke, I got ice cream. I was counting on more of the same.

  It was strange to be inside a hospital so early in the day. With few people around, it’s sort of comforting, as if all its staff and machinery were there just for you. On the other hand, the handful of nonstaff people in the waiting room looked tired, sad, worried, even doomed. It occurred to me that I probably looked the same way to them. I was glad when we were summoned to pre-op.

  I’ve read all sorts of horror stories about surgical patients picking up staph infections and such at hospitals. My father-in-law, Don Winkler, had a terrible experience with staph following bypass surgery at a hospital in Nebraska. I’m not sure how this kind of thing can happen if the average hospital is kept as cold as Piedmont. I felt fully refrigerated. I figured bacteria would go into hibernation. I put on my gown and no-slip socks, bagged up my belongings, and crawled under the covers. A nurse took my vitals and started a drip to relax me in advance of the anesthesia. Dr. Hoffmann dropped by to reassure me. She also pulled a magic marker from her pocket and drew an arrow on my right cheek pointing to my right ear. I was happy for the precaution but a little dismayed by the need for it.

  I was alert, if not exactly wide awake, when Marty kissed me and mouthed, “I love you.” An orderly rolled me into the operating room. On my back, I could see lots of chrome and glaring lights. I flashed on the old Twilight Zone episode in which the doctors and nurses hovering over a surgical patient turn out to have faces like pigs. I was able to watch the silent ballet of masked women and men until I faded blissfully into deep, dark, dreamless sleep.

  What happened between then and my groggy awakening I got secondhand, of course.

  First, Dr. Hoffmann took a scalpel and cut along the back of my pinna, my outer ear, and folded it forward and out of the way like the page of a calendar. Then, using a high-speed, diamond-bit drill, Dr. Hoffmann bored through my skull an inch above my outer ear. Then she tunneled through the mastoid bone toward my cochlea, about an inch and a half away. What might seem like the obvious route—directly through the ear canal—is not an option. It’s too open. There’s nothing to which the implant wire’s electrode array can be attached. Plus, going through the ear canal would entail puncturing the eardrum, thus leaving the middle ear exposed to dust, gnats, and water.

  Dr. Hoffmann confided later that she had initially had difficulty finding my cochlea. All our cochlea are well protected by bone and thus hard to get at, but mine apparently was better hidden than most. She told Marty she was on the verge of calling another ear surgeon on her cell to get some advice when she finally spied the little nautilus, no bigger than a bean. I had visions of her being a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and being obliged to use up one of her “lifeline” calls—in order to stay in the game.

  When she did locate my cochlea, it was problematic. She said she “met with resistance,” rather like what happens when you snake out a kitchen drain pipe and meet with a tricky bend. She said she wasn’t sure if she’d gotten the electrode array completely into my cochlea but that, otherwise, the surgery had gone smoothly. She had threaded the array into the cochlea—I imagined it as rather like probing a crawdad hole with a blade of grass, as I had done as a country child—and secured its dime-sized head, a computer chip, in the cavity she had drilled, now reupholstered with my skin.

  Would it work, would it give me back some useful hearing capacity? I would find out in a month. It can take that long for the incision to heal and for the tissue to start growing around the new “bionic” parts. Attaching the exterior processor, a mated magnet, might pull the electrode array out of line. The only certainty at this moment was that I would never hear naturally with my right ear again. No matter which medical breakthroughs lie ahead, no serum or stimuli would revive my cochlea. Implantation almost always equals destruction. I was sure my right ear was DOI (dead on implantation).

  Foggy and wobbly, with a white gauze pad like one of Madonna’s notorious breastplates taped over my right ear, I was with Marty in her little Nissan Sentra heading back to Athens by 3 p.m. That’s 3 p.m. of the same day. The hole in the head notwithstanding, a cochlear implantation is more often than not an outpatient surgery.

  What I wanted most in the world was to get home and climb into bed with the blinds down and the curtains pulled. What Marty wanted most in the world was to get home and climb into bed with the blinds down and the curtains pulled. Like me, she had had virtually no sleep the night before. Unlike me, she hadn’t spent three hours that morning in chemically induced oblivion. I was groggy. She, though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, was brain burned.

  The timing of my hospital discharge couldn’t have been poorer. From our house in Athens to Piedmont Hospital is an hour-and-a-half drive between midnight and 5 a.m. Any other time of day, that’s the minimum you can expect. We headed out as the city’s infamous rush hour was starting—five or six lanes of traffic in each direction, cars and trucks blasting along at sixty-five to seventy miles per hour, most of them tailgating. Marty made it down I-285, the Atlanta Bypass, and north up I-85 past Jimmy Carter Boulevard to the exit for Athens, Georgia, 316, without getting bashed. But a couple of miles east of 85, she suddenly pulled off the highway to a side road and then an empty parking lot.

  I was baffled. “What are you doing?”

  “Have to sleep,” she mouthed.

  “We’re only about thirty-five minutes from home,” I said. “The painkillers are starting to wear off. I need to get home, take another pill, and lie down.”

  She pulled out her steno pad. “If I don’t sleep a little, we will never make it home,” she wrote. And with that, she lowered the windows slightly, turned off the engine, ratcheted back her seat, and closed her eyes. I tried to lean my head against the window, letting the fat bandage function like an airline pillow, and listened to the newly aggravated sounds in my head. It sounded like Gamelan, the music of Bali, all gongs and bells and, to my Western ears, dissonance.

  Chapter 13

  Helplessly Hoping

  Two days after my surgery, one of Marty’s older sisters, Margaret, a retired nurse, flew in from Texas to help out. Two days after that, Marty had a malignant mass removed from her right breast, along with lymph nodes for testing, at Athens Regional.

  Margaret had volunteered to cook for us and keep the house straight while Marty and I recovered, but what we really needed her for was her ears. We desperately needed an intermediary who could understand what the doctors and nurses said and ask them questions. We needed someone who could take phone calls when Marty was asleep.

  We were aware that there were special telephones on the market that use voice-recognition technology to translate a caller’s words into text and display them on a screen. But acquiring gadgets of that sort seemed premature, not to mention kind of defeatist. So what if I was conversationally useless at the moment? I was on the brink of a breakthrough; I was going to hear.

  My recovery, physically at least, was speedy. I’d had root canals that left me more drained. I was up and around in a couple of days, moving slow but definitely moving.
Marty’s lumpectomy took a harder toll. The surgeon had removed the lump from her breast and some of the lymph nodes under her right arm. Beneath the bandages wrapped tightly around her chest and back, she was badly bruised. She was in pain, feverish, frightened, and angry. Frightened because, well, who wouldn’t be? And she was doubly sensitive to the possibilities because another of her sisters, Amy, was battling a form of cancer for which there was no known cure. She was angry because she had in the previous year made some serious headway in her musical ambitions, releasing Under Your Heart, a CD of her songs (and ours), and getting chosen to perform live at Athfest, the city’s annual summer music festival, and to be included on its sampler CD. And here she was with a husband with an energy-draining illness and a potentially life-threatening malady of her own. Weeks of radiation therapy awaited her, side effects unknown.

  The first week was like living a John Cassavetes movie—A Man and Woman Under the Influence. I had never felt more isolated or helpless. My left ear was good enough for only the simplest phrases, spoken just an inch away. Activation of my implant was weeks away, leaving me with no hearing in my right ear, just growing tinnitus. I could read. I could try to watch TV with captions. I could email. But meaningful conversation was so difficult, it scarcely seemed worth the exertion. I alternated between depression and mild hysteria.

  Mild is how it seemed to me. Marty believed I was overreacting to the slightest provocations, from the clutter in the house to her mood swings. I thought she was losing touch with reality. Margaret refereed as best she could. She knew her sister; she had helped raise her. She knew me only from an hour here and there at family reunions and thus had no way of knowing if my behavior was better or worse than usual.

  On Saturday, the day after her surgery, Marty felt surprising well and decided she wanted to show Margaret something of Athens besides a hospital. She had Margaret drive her to Athens’s Memorial Park, where we often go to walk around the big pond, feed the turtles and ducks, and tour the small zoo of native-to-Georgia rescue animals. Margaret thought she was attempting to do too much too soon, but Marty insisted. She craves the outdoors.

  All was well, or so we thought. She awakened on Sunday morning with a fever and having what she said felt like an asthma attack. She was panicking; I couldn’t think straight. Margaret took over. “There’s a type of pneumonia that’s specific to hospitals,” she said. “We’re going to the ER.”

  At St. Mary’s Hospital’s emergency room, a doctor checked her breathing, prescribed an antibiotic, and chastised her for ignoring her surgeon’s order to take it slow and easy. This time, with Margaret taking on the role of tough cop, she listened.

  To keep herself busy while resting, Marty planned a party by phone and text. October 10 was Downie’s birthday and, as it happened, Margaret’s, too. Marty managed to keep both in the dark by telling Downie it was a surprise for Margaret and vice versa. The venue she picked was a Vietnamese cafe where Downie worked part-time. The owners were only too happy to be in on the plot. Marty invited a half-dozen friends of ours and Downie’s and told them to be at the restaurant at 6 p.m.

  That Friday afternoon, Marty, Downie, and Margaret headed to a nearby nail salon for a “girls” outing, leaving me by myself at the house. As party time approached and they hadn’t returned, I texted Marty. She texted back that the manis and pedis were taking longer than expected and that I should go on to the restaurant by myself. They’d meet me there.

  I was annoyed. I felt as though I had a diving bubble or space helmet hermetically sealed over my head. What was I supposed to do at the restaurant? Greet the guests with notes on a pad? I got in my car, felt rather than heard the engine catch, and drove to the restaurant. Some of the guests were already there, waiting to go, “Surprise!” Instead they said, “Where’s Downie? Where’s Marty?” I watched their mouths, figured out the words, pulled out a steno pad, and wrote, “Getting nails done. Running late.”

  They gave me quizzical looks, asked me how I was doing— my head was still bandaged—and soon became immersed in conversation among themselves. I listened to the white noise, did my best to smile when someone looked at me, and watched my watch. I was anxious and getting angrier by the minute. Now would be a good time for space aliens to abduct me, I thought. Just shoot down a beam and vacuum me right up into the mother ship.

  When Marty and the birthday girls sashayed in merrily almost an hour late, I got up and gave each a hug and a kiss on the cheek. A splendid time was apparently had by all. I thought the party would never end.

  The day after we drove Margaret to the airport in Atlanta, Marty wrote on a steno pad, “I think you ought to go to Laurel to see Nell.” Nell is Nell Damon, my late mother’s only sister and one of my few surviving relatives of that generation. She and my mom had sold their respective houses and bought another one together when I was in my early twenties, and they had remained roommates until my mom’s death in 2003.

  My first reaction upon reading Marty’s note was “You’ve got to be kidding.” Laurel was more than seven hours away, and she expected me to jump in the car and drive there by myself. I was uneasy just driving to my job on the university campus, less than three miles from home.

  I was a little surprised I was actually allowed to drive. Marty had taken to referring to me as “legally deaf” when she made medical-related phone calls for me; plus, it gave her a quick, easy out when telemarketers called for me. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Holston is legally deaf.”

  There’s no such designation in the law. Legally blind, yes. That means you can see a little something but not nearly enough to be allowed behind the wheel of a car. But legally deaf, no. You can still get a driver’s license and chauffeur yourself around solo even though you can’t hear a fast-approaching ambulance’s siren or another motorist’s honking horn. To compensate, you have to constantly dart your eyes from mirror to mirror, pay attention like you haven’t since you were getting your learner’s permit, anticipate, anticipate, anticipate, grit your teeth, and pray.

  On the long drive to southeast Mississippi, there would be all that and more. I couldn’t buy chips and a Coke at a convenience store without having the clerk write the amount on a pad. If I got stopped by the cops, they might mistake me in my uncertainty for a drunk. If had car trouble, my AAA card would be useless. I couldn’t make the call. I didn’t just dread the trip, I was two steps shy of panic.

  But Marty was adamant. She needed space. She needed time alone. She said she couldn’t continue to deal with my deafness while she was dealing with postsurgical pain and thinking ahead to the recommended radiation therapy. She wanted me out of the house. She phoned my aunt and said, “Hey, guess what. Noel’s coming to see you.” Or so she wrote on the pad a little later.

  I had made the drive from Athens to Laurel by myself a dozen times when I was on a fellowship at the University of Georgia in the mid-1990s. I knew the Athens to Atlanta to Birmingham to Tuscaloosa to Meridian to Laurel route well. But on those trips, I had had radio news and CDs to keep me alert and awake. I had a cache of preferred driving music—the B-52’s, Tom Petty, Alison Krauss, an anthology of Big Band-era classics featuring the likes of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Fletcher Henderson. Like Bobby McGee, I rode a song of wind across Alabama to my hometown. But for this trip, I would have no outside aural stimulation, just nerves, strong coffee, and all the bone-conducted head-noise I could generate.

  Marty kissed me good-bye. It felt more like she was kissing me off. As I drove up the hill through our neighborhood to the highway that leads to Atlanta, I was uncertain, befuddled, and embarrassed. And pissed. I wanted to say, “If you need space so badly, why don’t you jump in your car and go somewhere?” But she was even less fit to travel than I, so I gave our old Nissan a little more gas and headed west. I could barely hear the engine or the tires on the pavement. I wondered if this was what space travel “sounded” like.

  By the time I got past the auto dealerships and furniture stores on Athens’s fringe
and turned onto Hwy 316, I was already getting anxious about simply getting around Atlanta, sixty minutes away. After living on Long Island and negotiating the notorious LI Expressway, I thought I would be comfortable driving anywhere. But Atlanta is insane. To get around it and on the road to Birmingham, you have to do fourteen miles on I-85 and another twenty on the 285 Bypass, both five lanes wide and teeming from early, early morning until late at night with cars, pickups, and semis going seventy miles per hour or more. I hated driving in Atlanta under the best of circumstances.

  Interstate 85 was the raceway I expected. Both hands on the wheel, white-knuckled, I picked a right-side lane and stayed there, my eyes flitting constantly from rear-view to side mirrors to survey speeding Beamers and roaring trucks that made no sound for me beyond white noise. When I finally got to the exit for I-20 west of Atlanta, I took a deep breath and said a prayer of thanks. At the first rest area, I parked and walked to one of the concrete picnic tables. I climbed on the slab, lay down on my back, and closed my eyes. “Telstar” played on the phantom CD player in my head, oddly comforting, as though I were in orbit.

  To make sure I stayed awake the rest of the seven-and-a-half-hour drive, I talked to myself and sang old favorites—“You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” seemed particularly appropriate, as did “Honky Tonk Women.” I sang a cappella, masochistically off-key, and as loud as I could so that I could sort of hear myself by bone conduction. I took special note of the scenery. The stretch of interstate east of Birmingham is especially gorgeous, the exposed granite walls rising on either side looking not so much blasted as sculpted, chiseled by giants. I had always noticed it before. It’s impossible not to notice. But this time I really looked, really savored. It was a habit, I said to myself, that I needed to develop.