The Unsealed Ear

At a Distance

A man to my right, my deaf side, has the kind of voice that’s louder than thought. The man he sits across from speaks lower than the blood that beats a resting pulse in my ears. Liability, the loud man says. While the soft man answers, I can concentrate.

I am about to have surgery that might restore 90 percent of my hearing. It is not minor surgery, but it is not major, either. I will be naked in a hospital gown, knocked out, cut open, the smallest bones in my body addressed. I will let my doctor go exploring in my right middle ear without knowing what he’ll discover, if the secret of its wrongness will be detectable, fixable, or if it will remain beyond us.

Immediately following the surgery, the left half of my tongue will interpret most liquids as sour and lukewarm, while the right half will deliver the temperature and taste I expect. Months later, this will still be problematic. I will notice it most when I’m having my shift drink at the wine bar, learning Pinots and Sav Blancs so I can answer my customers’ questions. This misinterpretation will be the result of a bruised facial nerve, a common side effect of my surgery. It will diminish but could remain for up to one year.

My sense of smell will be undisturbed. My eyes will be no more myopic than before. Touch will be a comfort. Sam will wrap me in blankets, check my dressing, bring me broth and saltines, candy and tea, Oxycodone and antibiotics. He will take medication notes for me until I have the energy to do it myself. My right ear will be packed in bandages that look like half a bloody earmuff. My left ear will be uncovered and unaffected, able to hear phone calls and police sirens and Sam, plus the TV if subtitles are on.

These soon-to-come days are a reprieve of healing that will pass once I understand the consequences of my cure.

But here in the café, where I sit before surgery and before side effects, where I am preparing myself to become a person with almost perfect hearing, I need to record what it is like to half-hear. I imagine I might miss her, this person who listened hard and enjoyed her quiet, this part of me I have asked my doctor to erase. Today, a loud voice can pierce my concentration and a soft voice can focus it. After surgery, all voices might pierce.

To want to hear is to want sound and sound-makers to be intimate—not distant, not mediated. When I imagine hearing, I picture myself as a still point, poised to accept whatever approaches.

The Spirit of the Problem

When my doctor says he hopes, he thinks, what I regain of my hearing will make the possible side effect of balance disturbance worth it, I feel sick. I have a condition that opens an extra “window” in my ear, which should create vertigo but doesn’t because another condition causes the bones in my middle ear to shut one of the two windows I’m supposed to have open. “When we open that second window,” Doc explains, “your superior canal dehiscence might become symptomatic.”

He means that the openings in my skull around the superior hearing canals—the portholes that leak sounds from my body into my inner ears, ruin the tight seal required for good hearing, and threaten my distinction of up from down—might suddenly spin me off balance and toss me like a boat on open seas. He means the thing that originally brought me to his office, the thing we aren’t treating because it isn’t the biggest problem, might now become the biggest problem.

I nod. I take notes. Writing the words contains my fear of those symptoms, but does not help me ask good questions. I need to ask how likely? or balance disturbance as in can’t drive a car? As in can’t hike? Can’t walk? He...