What you say?

I am afraid, I really am,

I know it-

I feel it drowning me-

Beneath rivers that never meet the oceans

Currents pulling me under, not able to breathe,

Perpetually sinking into a world

Lying here patiently for me

As I knew, I really did, 

And this is why I was always afraid.

from "I am afraid" by Spiritus_Frumenti

Why the briefest of sabbaticals? What was sooooo important that I couldn't reach out to my best, most trusted friends? How many of you would believe it was the sound of so many millions of crickets? Okay, that's a bit simplistic and greatly understates the volume of what I refer to. My wife remarked several weeks ago that my hearing seemed worse than normal.

A banal, unromantic, clinical definition: 

tinnitus |ˈtinitəs; tiˈnī-| noun
ringing or buzzing in the ears.
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Latin, from tinnire ‘to ring, tinkle,’ of imitative origin.

Onomatopoetically, the word means that the sound it makes is like that of the "tinkling" of bells. In my situation, it would be like the definition of murder to someone whose family was butchered by a mad man would read: Verb, to take the life of another without the legal means or justification.

I've suffered from constant tinnitus since an artillery simulator exploded about 2 feet from my right ear during a live fire exercise in basic training. Normally, it's a minor irritant that sets mostly in the background until I'm subjected to complete silence, like at night when I'm reading in bed. However, what happened about 3 weeks ago was NOT mere tinkling of bells.

Are any of you "Spinal Tap" fans? I'm going to assume that if you read my essays you're at least exposed to Spinal Tap. Do you remember the scene when Nigel takes Rob Reiner to see his collection of rare and treasured guitars and Rob points out an amp with controls that measure 0 - 11? Nigel explains that he wanted amps that were "louder" than those that only went to "10" even though they were no louder, he could brag that he was "at 11!"

For argument's sake, let's say my normal tinnitus, which is usually a tone overlapping another, higher tone, is around a 3/10 until suddenly and without warning, the volume crescendoed at an 11/10! And it hasn't changed. It now includes a sound similar to crickets chirping behind 3 or 4 hi-pitched tones...needless to say, it's maddening. Oftentimes, when I'm speaking the sound reverberates back to me like I'm talking in a bathroom. 

I purchased my wife a sound spa for Christmas. One of the settings includes the sounds of a summer evening, frogs and crickets, etc. Last week, I came to bed and figured her machine was on. After reading a while, I got up to get a drink of water when I realized that the sound of her spa was also heard in the kitchen. Guess what? The damn machine wasn't on; it was my tinnitus, so loud that I mistook it for the lullaby of a sound machine. 

And I've yet to reach the funny part of the story. When I called my primary care doctor at the VA, the nurse decided she'd "triage" this over the phone by instructing me to avoid extra salt on my food (which I always do), to protect my ears from "undue noise exposure," etc. Ironically, the nurse wasn't listening to my protests. I finally had to "be firm" so she'd shut her pie-hole long enough to hear what I was trying to tell her. "I've had tinnitus for many years, it is unrelated to my salt intake, the settings on my amp" etc.

"I'm almost totally deaf in my right ear and need to know WHY this has started because I cannot afford to suffer additional hearing loss or I'm screwed! My right cochlea has suffered permanent damage that cannot be surgically repaired! Please, tell Dr. D that I need to be seen by an MD and or an ENT specialist to figure out what has gone wrong. PLEASE!" Message received, Thank God. I'm scheduled to see my primary care doc, "Dr. D", next week and an audiologist in 2 weeks or so.

So it would seem, my friends, that my body has shut down. It is arguable whether my brain has stopped functioning because many have argued, often vociferously, that my brain stopped many years ago. In any event, the combination of the pain in my back, hips, thighs, calfs along with this new "Summer's Eve" lullaby that prevents almost any restful sleep, is enough to drive me over the edge. In contradiction to the famous "M*A*S*H" song, suicide is most definitely NOT painless. I suspect suicide feels like being crushed by a metric ton of crickets and I, for one, think it just sucks any way you look at it.

XOXO

Ernst W.