Speak Up

I really can’t hear you.

I’m going to press pause on my series dedicated to different male-male relationships in pre-modern Japan. And although the following story is emotionally raw for me, I suspect that I will want to write about it with humor in the near future.

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A 1936 woodblock print by Hasui, a member of the Shin-Hanga (new woodblock prints) movement. I love how artists of this period combined elements of traditional Japan with what was then very modern. And Hasui’s ability to render falling snow is wonderful.

The story really begins in a car, sometime in the past few years. Although I wish my little black compact were as schnazzy as the vehicle in Hasui’s print, it will have to make do as a setting.

Hiro and I like to visit friends in not-so-nearby locales. My old friend Courtney, now living in the Portland suburbs, down in Oregon. Not to mention our bevy of friends in British Columbia. Both of those routes involve multiple hours in the car, and I can’t decide which I despise more: navigating the traffic between Tacoma and Olympia, or the traffic between Everett and Marysville. Probably the former, considering the length of the potential jams near Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Sometimes when we drive, Hiro engrosses himself in reviewing Twitter on his iPhone. If the stereo is on, it’s usually a band we agree on, like Yellow Magic Orchestra. But sometimes we converse.

I can’t remember when I started doing it, but I fell into the habit of asking Hiro to speak up. Even with the stereo off, it’s loud in traffic, it’s loud sitting with my car’s engine noise. And Hiro can tend to mumble. Or so I told myself.

Last week, however, I noticed something very odd.

Hiro and I were each at our computer desks in the office on the ground level of our home. He had his noise-cancelling headphones on, I had mine on (his are blue, mine are pink), but I noticed him waving at me. I removed the headphone from my right ear to find out what he wanted to talk about.

And at a distance of less than two meters, Hiro’s voice sounded fuzzy. The room was relatively quiet, aside from the hums of our computers.

I then switched ears, replacing the headphone on my right ear and removing the headphone from my left.

Startlingly different. Much clearer.

Oh, shit.

I made an appointment at a nearby Costco’s hearing center this past Monday. I didn’t think I needed hearing aids, which is what they’d want to sell me, but I did want to find out if there was anything wrong.

Yup. For once, my psychosomatic fantasies rang true. Shit was wrong.

Two different results made the Costco technician share a serious look with me.

In the photograph of my right ear canal, there’s a white, blobby mass. Small, sure, and it doesn’t occlude the canal, but she had no idea what it was. It’s not earwax, which was also in the photo and visibly very distinct.

And when it came to my hearing, the (relatively) good part is that there indeed loss in both ears (and that hearing aids will correct for that), but the part that made her pause was that the loss is asymmetrical. One ear’s loss across frequencies looks like a gently declining slope (meaning the loss is more significant at higher frequencies), and the other ear’s loss across frequencies looks like a speed bump, worse at both the low and high frequency ends.

“That’s very rare,” she said. “I’d see a doctor if I were you.”

A 2008 me flaunting one of the ears in question. Thank goodness I’ve kept my looks (with the help of Clinique’s anti-aging line).

Yesterday, I had a scheduling call from my local otolaryngology department. The earliest appointment is just under three weeks away. In the meantime, I notice other symptoms, some old, like the persistent high pitch in my ears I just assumed was background noise, and some new, like the now-and-again dizziness I feel when lying down with my ear plugs in. (I wear ear plugs at night because, ha ha, I can hear road sounds outside my bedroom window all too well. Fucking ironic.)

All of this is triggering my situational anxiety tendencies. My immune system is suddenly weaker, and Hiro shared his sore throat and congestion (which normally bounces off my white blood cells). My fatigue levels are through the roof. And every rejection (in the last week, I’ve had thanks-but-no-thanks letters from two agents, a literary magazine, and a writing contest) echoes in my mind, hoping to worst-case-scenario me into believing I’m a terrible writer.

But…

Hiro at the cafe within the Ōsaka City Museum of Fine Arts last May, smiling at me as he has for the past three-odd decades,

When I came home from the onsite office on Tuesday, Hiro had a surprise waiting. He had made me my favorite sandwich. I cried in his arms.

Then for dinner, we cleared off the dining table and dusted off the grill for an impromptu pork-belly barbecue. And last night, we finished the last of the Riesling with a hot pot dish of his creation: chicken meatballs and mushrooms, tofu and bean sprouts in a peanutty, zesty broth.

He’s not psychic, but after all our time together, he can read my moods. Thank goodness.

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Shameless plug: My dear friend August Owens Grimm has had an incredible book review published at Hippocampus. Give it a read!

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