Hardware Update

and other otolaryngology news

The early-flowering varieties of cherry trees are blooming here in the Seattle area. The branches of the willows blush with barely suppressed greenery, and as much as I detest commuting to work most days, the apple tree blossoms have set off like so many fireworks along my route. Photo by the author, March 12, 2017, Washington Park Arboretum.

There is other non-hearing-related news, still under the rose of secrecy. A certain joy has been on hold since February 13th, but I suspect that by this time next week, I will finally be able to let you all know. Knock wood. Fingers crossed.

This morning’s Tarot draw was the Nine of Cups. Wishes come true! The stars and the portents are in alignment. It’s down to some bureaucracy now…

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Meanwhile…

Brian, demonstrating how not to wear his new hearing aids.

I purchased the new Apple AirPods Pro to use as hearing aids. I don’t wear them all the time—they don’t help with the tinnitus—but I think they will help.

I also saw an otolaryngologist on Wednesday. (I’m one of those people who repeatedly use a hard-to-spell word to drill that spelling into my head.) The visit was brief, no doubt thanks to the HMOs like Kaiser Permanente, which view patient treatment as a hindrance to profit. But the diagnosis of asymmetrical hearing loss still stands.

And there will be an MRI at some point in the future. One, admittedly rare, cause of hearing loss can be a cranial tumor that presses on the otic, or auditory, nerve. And the otolaryngologist said that, in equally rare cases, hearing loss might be the only way to detect some forms of brain cancer.

My husband is excited for the MRI. I know that sounds weird. But he’s watched me grapple with strange headaches for many years now. In fact, one of the headaches, a sensation midway between throb and stab, has nestled in above my right eye socket. Experience tells me it won’t stay for long, although I now and again experience headaches that last for hours.

I suspect, however, that the MRI will either show no tumors or be inconclusive, frustrating us both.

And what if there are tumors?

Here’s where my Roman Catholic upbringing might just, ironically, come in handy.

My father became a deacon in the late 1970s, a few years before his death. Before his vocation, he was very much a boomer. As a teen, he was a lifeguard at a restricted (i.e., no Jews or Black Americans allowed) lakeside resort. After his Vietnam-free stint in the army, typing reports for his drunk CO and learning to golf really well, he came home to Pearl River, married my mother, and, when he wasn’t commuting for three hours each day to a bank job in the Bronx, he was hanging out at the Pearl River Fire Department. (Even though he was too skinny to work the hoses, he did drive the fire engines.)

Before his vocation, he embodied middle-class white American values, among them racism and homophobia, and let’s don’t forget misogyny. Although his vocation might not have been a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment, he did change. Attending Catholic marriage counseling also helped, I believe, as did his prognosis—he had his first heart attack in 1971, when he was 28, and when the attacks and surgeries kept coming, I have to assume that his cardiologist made him aware of the rapidly approaching end to his mortality—he died in 1980.

Daddy at his ordination at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, in 1977. Thank goodness his vocation didn’t strip away his impish smile (and thank goodness I inherited it, too).

When I say my Roman Catholic upbringing might come in handy, I’m not referring to the Seven Sacraments or to my years as a special education catechist. Not to my time as an altar boy or choir boy or in the CYO, not to my days working in the parish rectory and the bingo hall.

At some point after his vocation, my father recommended two books. I Am Third, by Gayle Sayers and Al Silverman, was meant to teach me humility and to possess a greater faith in God with a majuscule G, just as I was taught. But I already was a flamboyant child at eleven and twelve, and football stories bored me silly.

The second book, Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther, details the death of the author’s son Johnny, at age seventeen, to brain cancer.

Now, I had already discovered the historical fiction of Mary Renault at that point (thank you, Nyack Library!), and was well on my way to a queer (albeit closeted) adolescence. Still, Death Be Not Proud came with enough melodrama to leave a lasting impression on me, especially during the years when Billy Joel’s Only The Good Die Young had just begun its climb to triple platinum.

For years, I believed that I would follow my father and die at age thirty-eight. And since I wasn’t having heart attacks, I knew it would be brain cancer that would bring me to my tragic end. Me and Johnny Gunther, stopped like shiny beetles in amber, forever young(ish, in my case) and beautiful.

I turned 38 in 2004 and, spoiler alert, I survived.

But here I am in 2026, at age 60, and brain cancer is back on the (very, very hypothetical) horizon. My Johnny Gunther days are long behind me—I’m still beautiful, though—and a small part of my psyche is darkly guessing what the MRI, whenever they schedule it, might show.

And so I spent an hour on the phone last night with an old friend, grateful to be caught up to date and to bask in the warmth of her laughter, as I have for the past forty-two years.

Is brain cancer coming for me? I highly doubt it, but if so, I can guarantee no Damascene conversions or vocations. I will love harder than ever, and write my exit with so much melodrama. John Gunther couldn’t even.