Life After Deaf

by Noel Holston

  I haven’t prayed to be delivered from this disability, and I haven’t asked friends or family to do so on my behalf. If they want to on their own, wonderful. I appreciate the love and good and positive energy it represents. But I don’t count on it to cure my problem, a pretty niggling ailment, actually, given all the possibilities. It’s not that I don’t “believe” in the practice, just that I don’t think my mind is now or ever will be big enough or acute enough to grasp whatever Big Picture there might be.

  I wrote a song that addresses this idea some years ago. Marty and I were driving up the Natchez Trace, a quiet Mississippi highway that follows an ancient Native American path from Vicksburg up through Jackson to Nashville. Somewhere around Tupelo, where we hoped to see Elvis’s birthplace and possibly the phantom king himself, I had a flash of inspiration while listening to a gospel radio station. Marty was napping on the passenger side when I pulled off the Trace, found a ballpoint and an empty envelope in the glove compartment, and jotted down the lyrics buzzing around in my head. It took no more than ten minutes. It’s about what we pray for and how. I eventually called it “These Things.”

  Give us this day our daily bread

  Stop the roof from leaking over our heads

  And don’t let us be too easily led

  These things we ask of you

  Watch over our souls while we’re asleep

  Keep the price of tomatoes from climbing too steep

  Make the rest of our years always be leap

  These things we ask of you

  These things we ask of you, dear Lord

  These things we ask of you

  We’ll get by somehow if you don’t come through

  But these things we ask of you

  Bow heads at the table, kneel by our beds

  We think with our hearts, we thank with our heads

  But you’re in the black, Lord, and we’re in the red

  These things we ask of you

  These things we ask of you, dear Lord

  These things we ask of you

  We’ll get by somehow if you don’t come through

  But these things we ask of you

  We fall on our faces, we fall on our knees

  We know, dear Lord, you do as you please

  Help us to tell the woods from the trees

  These things we ask of you

  These things we ask of you, dear Lord

  These things we ask of you

  We’ll get by somehow, we always do

  But these things we ask of you

  I haven’t got a clue whether my hearing loss or any other adversity I’ve ever faced is “personal” or if it’s part of some larger plan like, oh, prompting me to write a book. When I pray—and I do—it’s never for things, just for patience and perspective.

  Chapter 25

  Realm of the Senses

  I hit upon a new coping strategy: sensorial diversity.

  I was a big fan of Marvel comics when I was a teenager, and none of Stan Lee’s imperfect superheroes intrigued me more than Daredevil, a blind crime fighter who had developed his other senses, not to mention his reflexes, to prodigious heights to compensate for his inability to see. As I came to realize that I might never regain anything approaching full hearing and that what I did regain might well be erratic and spotty, I started thinking about Daredevil and his triumph of will.

  I was a little old for gymnastics and martial arts training. I wasn’t even playing basketball anymore because of fallen arches. Still, I stepped up my exercise regimen at the Y, betting that with patience, consistency, and a lack of vanity when it came to deciding how much weight to lift, I could get myself back into shape for more adventurous hiking, perhaps even running. It would be good to feel the air rushing past my face and arms again.

  The goal wasn’t to develop super senses, but to indulge those that were not impaired. If new music sounded like ugly sonic mush, I could indeed stop and smell the roses. And the coffee. And the baking bread. I could crush a few leaves of rosemary or basil between my thumb and forefinger and inhale the fragrance, an olfactory wake-up call. I could get high on the aroma of garlic and onions slowly sautéed in olive oil. I could breathe the scent of Marty’s hair in the night.

  If I yearned for freewheeling conversation, I could treat myself to a premium chocolate bar, order the orgasmic escargot at Athens’s one-and-only French bistro, or eat a Vietnamese or Greek dish I had never tried before. I could detour off the Interstate and onto a Georgia back road that would lead me to a roadside stand selling heirloom peaches, exquisitely flavorful beneath their thick, old-fashioned fuzz. I could have a slab of vine-ripened tomato with sea salt and a dash of mayo. I could make my mom’s gumbo.

  If I couldn’t make a phone call, I could feel the shock and thrill of a sudden dive into a cool swimming pool. Like the B52s sang, I could “dance in the garden in torn sheets in the rain.” I could invest in Egyptian cotton sheets with a sinfully high thread count. I could start treating massage as a necessity, not a luxury. I could take a tip from my wife, an apparel hedonist, and buy some clothes strictly for the feel of them.

  If I felt deprived of aural stimulation, I could use my two reasonably good eyes to see more than I had been seeing. Just as our brains learn to screen out sounds that aren’t necessary, so it is with our vision.

  What’s the Bible verse? There is none so blind as he who will not see? It’s true. We can become so narrowly or tightly focused that the wider world becomes a blur. One of the reasons nature documentaries can be so compelling is that the filmmakers focus for us. They share their observational powers. They direct our eyes. But we are capable of doing this for ourselves, albeit not exotically. Our own backyards are teeming with natural wonder if we stop, get still, and really, truly look. There are remarkably intricate mushrooms and lichens near my house that I barely noticed before I adopted the Daredevil approach. There are little green lizards that flash pink throat pouches and shiny, black-and-blue skinks that are too gorgeous for such an inelegant name. And now that I have trained my eye to pay more attention, I not only see vastly more birds—cardinals, flickers, cedar waxwings, purple buntings—flitting around the trees off my back deck, but hawks on power lines or in dead trees along the highway and egrets fishing in roadside ditches and ponds. How many years did I look right past them? Now they are the music I drive to.

  Museums and art galleries likewise have come into sharper focus. I’ve always loved museums. The Lauren Rogers Museum in my Mississippi hometown was a great source of childhood pleasure and learning for me, an eclectic treasure trove of Choctaw basketry, European oil paintings, and twentieth-century folk art. With the onset of my hearing loss, I made it a resolution to seek out and closely observe visual art, from Athens street-corner mascot sculptures—bulldogs done up by artists as everything from bankers to Carmen Miranda—to Harold Rittenberry’s wrought-iron folk art to a Salvador Dalí exhibit at Atlanta’s High Museum.

  On a visual-stimulation excursion to the Georgia Museum of Art, an especially magnetic destination because it’s on the edge of the University campus and free of charge except for a suggested three-dollar donation, I was delighted to discover a competition in progress. The museum houses a selection of Renaissance paintings donated by the Kress Foundation, named for the five-and-ten-cent store magnate, a prodigious collector. For purposes of the project, everyone who viewed the paintings in the Kress gallery was encouraged to create new art—a painting, a sculpture, a video, a story, a song, a photograph—in response to one or more of the pieces.

  I settled on a painting, a Crucifixion tableau by Paolo Schiavo, a fourteenth-century Florentine painter, and returned a few days later to sit and quietly observe it. I turned off my battery-powered ears. I ended up composing a prose poem. What surprised me was not how much there was to see, but how much, when I concentrated and imagined, that there was to hear.

  I submitted it under the title “Listening to Art”:

  I came to you because I
’d gone deaf

  Not that I expected any healing, mind you

  I don’t believe in miracles

  Not big ones anyway

  I didn’t even know you were present

  In these gleaming pine corridors

  Hobnobbing with saints who say they knew you

  No, I came because I made myself a New Year’s resolution:

  “Celebrate the senses you have left, son. Indulge.

  Nuzzle that glorious velvet, trace an old hickory’s furrowed bough.

  Savor that wild strawberry, that kiss of mint.

  Smell the roses and the coffee, of course. And the sour mash ferment

  Of sweet gum leaves and carrot shavings making compost cider.

  Watch the sunrise blossom, the waxwings dining by the open window.

  Look at art. Yes! And really look this time.”

  And so it was that I came to this ivory hall, seeking a feast for my eyes

  Not you, just a three-buck all-you-can-eat.

  But there you were, in that Florentine’s ferocious miniature,

  A king embracing eternity between thieves, dying for their sins, our sins

  Dying for your decency, for your inability to betray your loving heart.

  What a sensory magnificence.

  Schiavo’s palette burned my eyes, his reds dark like your last cup of wine, like blood I have given

  I could feel the rough timber beneath your pale limbs

  I inhaled sorrow, tasted triumph.

  And I could hear

  The Romans grousing, debating your paternity

  The sobs that had welled inside your mother for 30 years

  Magdalene’s words of comfort

  There, there. Sssssssh.

  Calvary was alive, aural, a cacophony.

  I could hear it.

  For a moment I could hear.

  Scrutinizing and savoring art is a sensory experience, and so, I now understand, is writing, which for so many years was for me a means to an end. But so, too, are a near infinite number of things we do, from building a birdhouse to bricking a patio, from planting bulbs and seeds to inhaling the fragrance of simmering spaghetti sauce. It’s all in how you approach these “routine” experiences. Expanding their variety and making them fresh and meaningful to yourself, that’s the way you do it, that’s how you cope.

  Chapter 26

  Fight Club

  In late July, I went to see Dr. Steenerson. After examining my implanted ear, he agreed to attempt the revision surgery. “Attempt” was the operative word. He expected the operation to be tricky. To avoid the resistance that Dr. Hoffmann had reported encountering, he said he might have to do a sort of “back-door” approach and a “split” electrode array in order to maximize placement. He told me, through Marty, about a woman he had helped who had difficult bone structure. He was so intrigued and perplexed by my predicament that he said he would do the operation for a lower, out-of-pocket fee if BCBS declined to cover it.

  We set a November 26 date for my pre-op, with the surgery to take place on December 6.

  Marty called Dr. Pendorff’s office at Emory and canceled my follow-up appointment.

  Meanwhile, Blue Cross denied my request for the revision, stating in a letter that it wasn’t “medically necessary.”

  Marty and I were ready to take advantage of Georgia’s liberal gun purchase laws. Not medically necessary? Were they freaking kidding? I couldn’t even talk to them on the phone, and they were acting as though I wanted them to cover getting a tattoo removed.

  Via NextMD, I emailed Dr. Hoffmann. I told her that I was appealing my case to Blue Cross and that I would appreciate her writing a letter of support, endorsing my need and Dr. Weber’s recommendation.

  “I’m not sure what medically necessary means, but the revision is functionally essential for me,” I said. “My hearing range with the implant is about two feet, and even that close, words are fuzzy and indistinct. I’m useless at meetings and in class. My wife has to pass me notes at dinner. We’re learning to sign.”

  Hoffmann had a letter ready on August 9. My brother Tim also provided a brief for my appeal. Thankfully, Blue Cross relented. The redo would be covered. But there was a catch. Dr. Pendorff would have to do the surgery or he would have to decline to do it. Formally.

  When we reapproached Dr. Pendorff, we told him what Steenerson proposed and what BCBS had said, and we were shocked to hear him changing his tune. Maybe he would give it a shot after all. He was annoyed that I had canceled my follow-up appointment and wanted me to come in again for another exam. We wondered if his professional competitiveness had kicked in.

  Dr. Pendorff ultimately acceded to our wishes. In a phone conversation, Marty told him, flat out, that we would rather go with a practice with which we were more comfortable. In a terse letter on October 4, he told Blue Cross Blue Shield that after careful consideration, he was “not prepared to accept Mr. Holston as a surgical candidate.”

  The day after Thanksgiving, Marty and I drove to my pre-op appointment with Dr. Steenerson. I was on his surgical calendar for December 6. When he looked at my right ear with an otoscope, he was startled. He summoned us to another exam room that had a microscope on a sort of crane that looked like something from a dentist’s office. He grumbled. Even I, unable to hear, could tell by his expression that something wasn’t right.

  He told Marty that the electrode array of my implant was “extruded.” It had somehow worked its way through the tissue. A portion of it was visible, even to the naked eye, in my ear canal. Viewed through the microscope, he said he could actually see the tiny transistor along the wire. And to make matters worse, my eardrum appeared to have detached since he had last seen me.

  He put my surgery on hold, told me to avoid showering until I could get an earplug that would seal it, and sent me home. Marty and I didn’t talk much on the drive back to Athens. We were both at a loss for words, not that I would have been able to understand much of hers anyway.

  A few days later, Dr. Steenerson himself called. He told Marty he had no other choice but to cancel my December 6 surgery. He said that the extrusion and the damage in my ear canal would make what already promised to be a long, tricky operation longer and trickier. He said that it would likely take six or seven hours and that, at his age, seventy, he was concerned about having the stamina and acuity to do the operation properly.

  Just before Christmas, we visited my Aunt Nell in Mississippi. On the return trip, we swung south through Mobile to see my brother and his family and to have him see if he could tweak the setting on my left-ear hearing aid. I was starting to see it as my best hope.

  At the hearing clinic he oversaw at the University of South Alabama, he introduced me to the new ENT on staff, a doctor with a name like a Smokey and the Bandit character: Wylie Justice.

  Tim had already been talking to him about my case, and Dr. Justice was eager to see this unusual malfunction in person. He had me lie down on an exam table, aimed the microscope at my right ear, and had me look at the monitor on the other side of the room. And there it was, just as Steenerson had described. It looked like a lonesome loop of Christmas lights hanging from the eaves of a house.

  Dr. Justice said the urgency of the revision surgery was greater than ever. I was at risk for all manner of infections. His advice was that I go to the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles.

  Neither Marty nor I had heard of it. Dr. Justice said that House is to ear problems what the MD Anderson Clinic in Houston is to cancer treatment and research. It was founded by an otologist who was a pioneer in hearing-restoration surgeries. Dr. Justice said the House clinic was internationally renowned, the sort of place Swiss bankers and Saudi oil sheikhs jet to when they have serious hearing problems. He urged us to contact the clinic as soon as we got back to Athens.

  Chapter 27

  House Call

  We took Dr. Justice at his word. Once we were home, we unloaded the car, let the cats out to play, and then went online looki
ng for information about the House Institute. The photos on its website were impressive, the building all gleaming chrome and glass with a beautiful fountain out front. The website’s history section said that physicians and scientists at the institute founded by Dr. Howard P. House had developed and perfected the cochlear implant and auditory brain stem implant for patients who are totally deaf. It listed ten ear specialists on staff, seven of whom performed surgeries.

  On the second day of January, Marty phoned the House Institute’s main number and asked to be transferred to someone she could talk to about a cochlear implant revision surgery. She was connected to Dawna Mills, a doctor of audiology. After listening to Marty recap my cochlear misadventure, Mills said we should send them my records and most recent CT scan as soon as we could gather all the materials.

  We priority-mailed the records two days later. We waited, but I didn’t just sit around twiddling my thumbs or tugging on my ear lobes. By this time, I had started to learn “speechreading”—a skill formerly known as lipreading—at the University of Georgia’s Department of Speech and Hearing. Twice a week, I would go to a booth at the department, and a young woman who was finishing up her masters, Kristina Kishimoto, would coach me on how the mouth forms various vowels and consonants, and she would read to me, sans hearing aid and implant, from a Time magazine or a Tom Clancy novel. My task was to answer her questions about what she’d read, or to recap.

  I was not surprised to find that I was lousy at it. My brother told me that even after three decades in audiology, he had never gotten very good at it. Not only is it an inexact art, he said, but some people just have more of a knack for it than others. Obviously, neither of us had gotten the speechreading gene.

  Still, I tried. I felt as though I needed every tool in my belt that I could acquire. Putting Kristina’s lessons into practice, however, was easier said than done. I quickly came to understand that people often don’t continue to face you when they’re speaking. They cover their mouths, they look away, they mumble. Even Marty had to be reminded that she had to look at me when she talked. I also realized how much I had come to reflexively avoid conversation at work. I still tended to email colleagues, even those whose offices are only a few steps from mine. I made a mental note: Stop that! Reengage.