by Noel Holston
On the morning of February 8, I opened my email files at work and saw that I had a message from the House Institute. It was from a William Slattery, one of the surgeons.
“It currently appears upon reviewing your CT scan that the cochlear implant is coming out of the ear and it has actually extended through the ear canal and through the eardrum,” Dr. Slattery wrote, his words metaphorical music to my ears. “I do have experience with this kind of case. I would suggest that you have revision surgery.
“I would be happy to set this up if you like,” he continued. “To do this I would close off your ear canal, which would not be a significant deformity. At the same time, I would go ahead and put in a new cochlear implant. I think this would help you significantly. If you decide that you want to move forward with this or if you want to discuss it further, please let me know.”
I texted Marty within seconds: “Just heard from a doctor at House Institute. He says he can do the do-over. Makes it sound like a piece of cake.”
She texted back: “Come home!”
I locked up my office, told the receptionist I was leaving, raced to the parking deck, and did my best not to speed on the way home. Marty was waiting at the front door to embrace me. She was aglow—happier even than I was. We went out to dinner to celebrate.
Back home, just after nine o’clock, Marty answered a telephone call. She saw me looking her way quizzically and mouthed, “It’s Slattery,” as she jabbed her finger at the phone. He had some questions for me that she excitedly scribbled on a pad. I filled in some history for him, and she took down the name and number of an associate of his he wanted us to contact. “He sounds confident and really nice,” she said when the House call ended. She made two fists in front of her chest and did a happy dance.
* * *
At my speechreading session with Kristina a couple of days later, her boss, Dr. Holly Kaplan, dropped by to see how it was going. I told her I thought I was getting a little better at it, and Kristina concurred. I also told her that I had heard back from House and that one of the surgeons there believed he could repair the damage.
“Who’s the doctor?” she asked.
“A guy name William Slattery,” I said.
“Slattery,’” she repeated, her eyes widening.
I felt as if I were in the scene from Bye Bye Birdie when Kim’s family learns they’re going to be on Ed Sullivan’s TV variety show. Celestial beams of light shine upon them. “Ed Sul-li-van!!” they sing as one, starry-eyed and reverent.
“You’ve heard of him?” I asked.
“Oh, my,” she said. “He’s only, like, one of the best three or four cochlear surgeons in the world.”
Bill Slat-ter-y!!
I began to think my prospects were looking up.
Chapter 28
Crossed Swords
Dr. Steenerson graciously signed off on the plan to have Dr. Slattery rewire me. But Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia, true to form, balked. Bad enough that I couldn’t find a surgeon on its roster, but did I really have to go to California? Hey, why not London? Zurich? Give these hypochondriacs an inch . . .
But I persisted. And Marty, my self-proclaimed personal assistant and squeaky wheel, really persisted. And with Hoffmann, Steenerson, Weber, and Slattery, plus my brother the audiology professor, my dentist, and my yard guy backing me up, BCBS relented and said, “Go West, old man.”
Marty immediately began looking online for affordable flights from Atlanta to Los Angeles in April, the soonest Dr. Slattery could get me on his schedule. From speaking with Slattery’s associate, she learned, much to our relief, that House Institute patients were eligible to stay in budget-rate accommodations nearby. Our house was buzzing with anticipation.
But life, we were soon reminded, doesn’t necessarily deal you one challenge at a time. Just because you lose your hearing or have to have breast-cancer surgery, that doesn’t mean you get a pass on everything else.
In early March, Marty learned that her father’s heart was failing and that his doctor in Nebraska was sending him to Kansas City for surgery. Don had already had a bypass, and this new surgery was his best hope of surviving. Marty flew out—not to be with her dad, but to watch over her mom in his stead at their house in tiny Denton, Nebraska.
Marty kept me up to date via text and the CapTel phone. The news was not good. Her father’s heart tissue was too soft for the operation. The surgeon sewed him back up and sent him to ICU. “What a perfect metaphor for my dad,” Marty texted me. “Outwardly tough, inwardly mushy.”
Her sister Margaret came to relieve her in Denton, and she moved on to her sister Amy’s house in Omaha, from where she was scheduled to fly home. There was no time for her to drive to Kansas City, but she did get to talk to her father on the phone. Early on the morning of her flight, her niece, a nurse at the hospital in Kansas City, phoned to tell Marty and Amy their father had passed on.
I picked Marty up at the Atlanta airport. As we drove home, she told me about seeing formations of migrating geese during her sunrise walk and about the empty seat next to her on her otherwise packed plane. She considered both signs from her dad, Don. She said little else. It was late when we got to our house. We were both so exhausted, we left her bags in the car.
Early in the morning, before dawn, Marty, with her wildcat ears, heard something.
When she came downstairs and parted the front drapes, she saw that the interior light was on in my car. Then she realized there was a white truck idling near it. She slipped on shoes, wrapped her jangle of keys around her fist, and charged out across the front porch yelling. The would-be burglar jumped in his truck and sped off.
Already angry and sad about her father, now she was furious. She ran to the street but couldn’t see the intruder’s license plate. She dialed 911. A squad car arrived in minutes. The police dusted my car for prints and took notes about the truck and what she’d seen and what she’d done.
I slept through it all. Still in her pajamas, she woke me and told me about the car. She also told me one of the officers had said, “You mentioned your husband. Is he not here?”
She said she told him, “No, he’s here. He’s deaf. World War III could break out in our living room and he wouldn’t know.”
According to Marty, the cop said, “Wow. You’re kind of a badass.” I saw her smile for the first time since I met her at the airport.
Preparing for our trip to Los Angeles—packing and arranging for neighbors to tend to our herd of cats—provided a needed distraction. Hope and anticipation offset grief. We flew from Atlanta to Los Angeles on April 14, a Sunday. Dr. Slattery and his staff created a schedule for us that minimized what was going to be a costly stay under any circumstances. The plan was that I would do my pre-op on Monday, have surgery on Tuesday, rest on Wednesday and Thursday, have my post-op appointment on Friday, and fly home on Saturday.
We had decided to make a sort of vacation of it: see some sights, get my head stroked and bored like the Beach Boys’ little deuce coupe, see some more sights if possible, and fly home to heal.
Flying in on a Sunday, early, was wise. Sundays are as quiet as Los Angeles gets, and the last thing we wanted was the stress of driving in multilane freeway traffic while looking for exits whose whereabouts I could only guess at. In all my trips to LA for TV-related events over the years, I had driven as little as I could get away with for that very reason. Miss an exit, and before you know it, you’re in Petaluma. I was once an hour late for an interview appointment with William Peterson, the star of CSI, because I saw my freeway exit too late. But this time, it was quiet. There was time to look and anticipate. Plus, we had a GPS, the greatest boon to travel since trail mix. We found St. Vincent’s so easily, it was as if we had a programmedself-driving car.
The House Ear Institute sits just across the street from St. Vincent Medical Center, the oldest hospital in Los Angeles. Just a couple of blocks away, on Wilshire Boulevard, is an entrance to Macarthur Park, immortalized in Jimmy Webb’s much-
recorded song about a shattered love affair and cake left out in the rain. The hospital was founded as the Los Angeles Infirmary in 1856 by the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, an order of nuns. Seton Hall, the nuns’ quarters, still sits on the site, shadowed by the now huge, high-rise hospital. Half of Seton Hall’s rooms have been converted into a sort of hospice/motel, with spartan but comfortable suites, complete with kitchenettes, where patients can stay for about the same rate as an Embassy Suites. An Embassy Suites in Omaha or Baton Rouge, that is, not Los Angeles. In other words, the rates are ridiculously, beatifically reasonable.
Courtesy of the House Ear Institute
We checked in and surveyed our room. The exterior wall was all window and unobstructed, affording us a panoramic view of tiled rooftops, palm-tree greenery, and a rise of mountains in the distance. We decided to spend the afternoon exploring the hilly neighborhood with its world bazaar of shops and babel of signage. We ate dinner at a Peruvian café where Marty’s modest knowledge of Spanish was enough to get us a great meal and royal treatment.
The next morning, we walked across the street from Seton Hall to the House Institute. It was as Oz-like as the online photos we’d seen had suggested, all glass and gleaming chrome. In a garden to the left of the entrance, a life-sized sculpture, a silvery figure on a tall pedestal, loomed against the blue sky like a Tin Man in a lab coat. The near side of the pedestal was embossed with the figure of a man reaching up with his right hand, his left pressed to his ear. In the lobby was a model of the human ear the size of a children’s playground slide. We stopped to shoot a few photos with our phones and then checked in.
Courtesy of the House Ear Institute
Once my name was called, we were sent to an exam room down a long hall and waited. With Holly Kaplan’s admiring “Slattery” echoing through my head, I halfway expected him to come flying in with a cape billowing behind. But when he turned up, William Slattery wore a standard white lab coat over a white shirt and gray suit pants. He was handsome in a soft, unassuming way and, like so many creatures of the medical world, pale. His manner was, likewise, unpretentious and pleasant—none of that godlike arrogance. He told us that while he had performed hundreds of revision surgeries, redos were actually quite rare in the larger scheme.
He went over my medical history and explained what he planned to do and why he believed he could make a more effective placement of the electrode array. He declined, even when directly asked, to critique the original operation, other than to acknowledge that the array had indeed migrated.
The only surprise for us—and the only thing to give me a little pause—was that he didn’t like how my current implant was situated. He would be drilling a new hole in my head and filling in the old one.
“Plastic Wood?” I jested.
The surgeon laughed. No, a kind of bone paste.
He also explained that he would have to surgically restore the tissue in my ear canal and build a sort of dermatological manhole cover over it to keep water from leaking past the detached eardrum and into my head.
Marty and I decided to make the most of the rest of the day. We set the GPS for Santa Monica. The sun was out, the weather mild, and we wanted to see some ocean before I went under the knife.
After we walked on the beach at Santa Monica, we drove north up the coastal highway through Malibu. We stumbled onto Pepperdine University, famous for its water polo team and partying, perched on a grassy slope overlooking the Pacific. Heading east into the mountains behind the school, we found ourselves on a snaking, spiraling highway that felt as though it were unspooling before us. It was like being inside a cochlea. We considered it a good sign.
Chapter 29
Ear We Go Again
Early Tuesday morning, sleepy-eyed and wishing I could have my usual dose of caffeine, I made the short walk from Seton Hall to St. Vincent’s, holding hands with Marty. We had talked about the possibility that a new implant might not work any better than the original. We had talked about the possibility that the removal of the old array might damage my ear so badly that I would have no hearing at all.
“There’s always ASL,” Marty said.
I laughed, and it wasn’t just nervous laughter. I was an old hand at this. Or an old ear, as it were. I was grateful we didn’t have to drive half asleep on an unfamiliar freeway, as we’d done in Atlanta. I could simply stroll. There was a garden in bloom. I hadn’t shaved my head, knowing this time that the prep nurse would merely buzz away a strip of gray hair just above my right ear. When the orderly rolled my gurney toward the operating room, it was down a long, glassed-in corridor, not the beige hallway of Atlanta. I could see fronds of palm trees flitting by. I could see blue sky. It was like riding an elevated monorail at Disney World. It was like a vacation. The drugs had obviously kicked in.
I have only the vaguest recollection of the OR. The lights were very bright. I was lifted off the gurney and onto the operating table.
The surgery took six hours. My first wake-up memory is of Marty trying to get me to eat something. I was a slug. I had no appetite. I was doing well to eat ice chips.
She kept insisting. “They’re not going to let you go until you eat,” she said, holding out a plastic cup of apple sauce. “Eat. Come on, baby. Eat. I’m ready to get us out of here.”
After forty minutes or so, a male nurse transferred me to a wheelchair and took us on what seemed like an endless, labyrinthine trip through the bowels of St. Vincent’s and back to our room at Seton Hall. I crawled into bed and slept like a stone until the next morning.
I awoke feeling . . . good. For someone who’d just had one hole bored in his skull and another one filled, I felt shockingly normal. I’ve felt worse in the morning after a couple of martinis. Marty snapped some pictures of me with my black eye and bulging head bandage while I savored a cup of coffee. I put a plastic cap over my head and got into the shower.
When I came out of the bathroom, she greeted me with a curlicue mustache she’d made by peeling an orange in one continuous loop. She looked like a cross between Salvador Dalí and a ray of sunshine. I laughed harder than I had laughed in a long time.
Then we went to breakfast. We walked to the hospital’s cafeteria. After she had polished off a plate of eggs and sausage, Marty spotted an old upright piano against the wall. While I savored my own plate of cholesterol, she flipped the piano open, tested it, ascertained it was pretty much in tune, and sat down to play. I couldn’t hear a note, but I could see hospital staff and other patients paying attention. I saw hands applauding. Magic moments were piling up. I was feeling optimistic.
For our noonday meal, Marty suggested El Pollo Loco, which we had passed during our presurgery exploration of the neighborhood. “I don’t know,” I said. “That sidewalk is pretty steep.”
“I’ll have your arm,” she said. “It just smells sooo good.”
Chapter 30
I Love LA
The El Pollo Loco sits a block and a half down the western slope of Alvarado Street from St. Vincent’s. We made it down the hill without me falling. Marty ordered for us—grilled chicken with sweet plantains and a bowl of rice and beans. The air was pungent and steamy with the scent of lime, cumin, garlic, and onion. The noonday rush was on. To minimize the clamor for her, we stationed ourselves at a small table behind an under-glass condiment buffet stocked with a luscious array of salsas and peppers.
From my window-facing seat, I had a broad view of diversity on parade. Across Alvarado I could see a small shop that sells knockoff Major League Baseball caps and Chinese porn DVDs, a Guatemalan café, and a vegetable stand-cum-smoothie parlor run by a refugee from Senegal. The diners at El Pollo Loco represented probably half the countries of Central America and several African nations, as well. We were two of the paler faces in sight.
I had on beat-up old blue jeans with big, ravel-fringed holes in the knees, grubby tennis shoes, and a lime-colored hoodie two sizes too small for me. I’d had to borrow it from Marty because I hadn’t p
acked warm clothes for an unexpectedly chilly Southern California spring. I hadn’t shaved or washed my hair for three days. I had a black eye and a swollen cheek on the right side. I looked as though I should have a grocery cart overflowing with ragged clothes and bulging plastic trash bags parked outside. Wrapped around my head was a white bandage that included a mound of gauze the size of a C-cup bra over my right ear.
As we waited for our number to be called, a man in a blue T-shirt with a stack of pamphlets in his hand and a bundle of what appeared to be multicolored shoelaces slung over his shoulder greeted my wife in Mexican-accented English and asked if she’d like to make a donation to his church. Marty lived in New York City for seven years. She is pretty much immune to the pleas of street preachers, vendors, hustlers, and panhandlers. She shook her head and said quietly and politely, “No, thank you.”
The man started to walk away, then turned back toward us.
“Did he just get out of the hospital?” he asked, glancing at me.
“Yes,” my wife answered.
He leaned in closer. “Does he need a place to stay?”
“No, thank you,” she said.
As the man moved to the next table and hit up another customer, this time speaking Spanish, my wife turned to me smiling and rolling her eyes.
I hadn’t actually heard any of this, of course. Marty recapped the exchange later, using a combination of slowly spoken words, scribbles on a steno pad, and pantomime.
And then I laughed out loud. I knew that I had laughed because I could feel it in my throat and chest. I was back where I started three years earlier: functionally deaf.