Despair, Hope, and Ether

Sometimes I want to write, and I want to write so badly, but the only thing lacking is an actual idea. It's very frustrating. So today, let's stick with something simple, like personal history and maybe see if we can glean a moral from a brief passage from my not-yet-written autobiography.

I am deaf in my right ear. In many instances, when one is deaf in one ear, it is attributed to nerve damage, and the victim is told to tough it out. Even in this era of modern technological miracles, there isn't a lot that can be done. In some situations, implants can work and the technology improves daily, but in my circumstance, the audiologists agree that I'm better off letting it be. However, my situation is a little unique in that I wasn't born deaf. I remember being able to hear out of that ear up to about the age of nine or ten. This sudden attack of deafness concerned my parents and after waiting to see if my hearing would get better on its own, we started seeing doctors.

Sometime around the age of twelve, we found one who thought he could help, a local ear, nose, and throat dude. He ran some tests and determined that it could be a problem with the bones in my middle ear and that it might be fixable through surgery. He also decided that he needed to remove my right adenoid. I understand about the middle ear, but I have no idea why he wanted to remove the right adenoid. I assume that he thought it might be impinging on the nerve in my inner ear, but I was twelve, so the technical stuff flew right over my head.

You also have to remember that this was 1970 and doctors recommended removing tonsils every time a kid sneezed. That's an exaggeration, but not by much. We actually had a whole mythology around it. If you were good and brave through the surgical process, you got ice cream. Lots and lots of ice cream. Almost every sitcom in the 50s and 60s that involved children had an episode where one of the kids had to have his or her tonsils removed—and needed to eat ice cream after the surgery. At the time, the medical community believed that tonsils were a useless appendage that could increase the likelihood of childhood diseases. We now know that's all garbage, that tonsils are important. The NIH states that tonsils "act as a front-line defense forming the initial immunological response to inhaled or ingested pathogens." In 1970, the medical community was coming around to that viewpoint, but it wasn't widely accepted yet. Adenoids were considered slightly more important than tonsils, but only slightly, and removal wasn't considered that big a deal. It was a minor, low-risk surgery and doctors could at least bribe the little street urchins with ice cream.

I don't want to make it sound like I grew up in a time when they were practicing medicine using stone knives and bearskins, but compared to what they can do today, it sure looks like it. Doubtlessly today, I would have gotten an MRI or CAT scan which would have allowed the doctor to check on my middle ear without surgery. And no one would even consider removing my right adenoid today. But no one wants to go through life deaf in one ear, so we chose the surgical option.

We scheduled the surgery on the first day of Christmas break. It would have been cool to have done the surgery in, say, October so I could miss some school, but my parents were both school teachers. I am not complaining one bit about having parents who were teachers, as I was afforded many wonderful advantages in my childhood from that fact, but we had to be at death's door before we could miss school. Lost a finger playing at recess? Well, sew it back on and get back to class! I mean, none of the other kids had to take a needle and catgut thread to school with them. I went to the hospital the night before the surgery, presumably because I wouldn't have been sufficiently frightened if I could have slept in my own bed overnight. They cleared out my guts, so there wouldn't be any "accidents" during the surgery. Early the next morning they wheeled me into the operating room.

Now the story gets a little weird. A few days before the surgery, the ENT dude asked my parents if they had a preference for who was the anesthesiologist. I'm sure he thought they'd say no, but they instead asked if our family doctor could deliver the anesthetic. I have no idea if my parents knew whether he was trained in delivering anesthesia (it turned out he was), but I'm sure they hoped that if they could get a familiar face in the operating room, it might be beneficial to me. The ENT dude said he'd ask. Well, I got into the operating room and the anesthesiologist was some guy I'd never seen before who looked a little like Tim Conway's old guy from The Carol Burnett Show. He quickly grabbed a mask, put it over my face, and told me to start counting backward from a hundred. I think I got to 90. Then the ringing in my ears got really loud and little tiny lights appeared and started spinning and then I was zonked.

They gave me ether, which has an interesting history in the medical world. By 1970, it was being phased out for a variety of very good reasons. When they wheeled me out of the operating room, my mother caught a whiff of the ether and got very angry. When she saw who the anesthesiologist was, she got even angrier. The ENT dude explained that he'd asked our family doctor, but he wasn't available. We later found out through our doctor that that was a lie, but there wasn't much to be done at that point.

Back in my hospital room, I was tripping. I was having some of the greatest hallucinations I would ever have in my life. Most involved being a heavily armored knight trying to rescue the damsel in distress. The best thing about it was I didn't even have to be asleep to watch the show, although I slipped in and out of sleep frequently. On several occasions, the medical staff checked in to ask how I was doing and whether my hearing was better. Perhaps a bit overly hopeful, I thought it might be a little better. That wasn't the right answer. It was supposed to be completely better. The ENT dude had told my parents that he was disappointed with the results, that he hadn't found the damage in my middle ear that he thought would be there. I might have been having a good trip, but my parents were sorely disappointed and still just a bit angry with our dude.

The hallucinations stopped, but I don't remember much about what happened next. I think I was in the hospital for another couple of days. The day I got home, I got violently sick, throwing up every hour or so. We believe it was a reaction to the ether, although I might have just as likely picked up a virus from one of the other hospital guests. Needless to say, Christmas wasn't much fun that year.

The surgery didn't help. We did many more tests over the next six months and the experts finally decided that it was nerve damage and I would have to tough it out. As chronic medical conditions go this isn't the worst, and I can easily turn it to my advantage. When I'm around someone talkative and boring (imagine your typical Democrat), it's no problem just shutting them out by making sure my bad ear is pointed toward them. I can also sleep through about anything. The sweet meteor of death can be crashing just outside the house and I can keep on sleeping into oblivion. I guess if I were trying to find a moral to this story, this would be it: Even a curse can be a blessing if viewed from the right perspective.

I am disappointed about one thing. I never got ice cream. Sometimes the myth is better than the reality.