Shattered Nerves: How Science Is Solving Modern Medicine's Most Perplexing Problem

9 Sound in the Brain

∑ 9 Sound in the Brain Marilyn Davidson lives in a neat, unassuming garden apartment complex in Anaheim, California, not far from Disneyland. At the ground- floor front door to her apartment are two doorbells, one of which has a sign above it reading, ‘‘Please push this bell.’’ When one does, there is no sound, but through a front window a visitor can see a light flash inside. Davidson, who was born in 1932, walks briskly to answer the door, despite the fact that her sense of balance is nonexistent. The semicircular canals and vestibular portions of her inner ears, which provide equilibrium, no longer function. Davidson’s physical problems came on without warning one warm, sunny day while she was still in her twenties. She and a friend decided to spend the day at the beach. While there, she began to feel poorly. Her stomach was slightly upset and she had an overall ‘‘weird’’ feeling. Assuming she had gotten a bit too much sun, she told her friend she was ready to go home. When she got there, she showered and went right to bed. The next morning, her friend called to see how she was feeling, but Davidson did not answer the telephone. After several attempts to reach her, Davidson’s friend called her sister, who lived nearby. She hurried to her sister’s house to find that Marilyn was still feeling disoriented and that her hearing was greatly diminished. She rushed Marilyn to the family doctor, who was stumped by her symptoms. Two weeks later, Davidson’s hearing returned to normal in Sound in the Brain 129 her left ear, but she still could hear nothing with her right. ‘‘I knew it was more than just a hearing problem. Because I was dizzy, I had a head noise, and my balance was o√, but nobody could find an answer,’’ recalled Davidson , who is originally from Nebraska but has spent most of her life in California. Over the next five years, Davidson went to a number of doctors trying to discover what was wrong with her, all to no avail. She eventually decided to just get a hearing aid and give up her search. But when she saw an audiologist to be fitted with a hearing aid, he told her that the results of the tests he conducted on her were the strangest he had ever seen. He suggested she make an appointment with William House, an ear, nose, and throat specialist , who along with his brother Howard, specialized in ear surgery. Davidson took the audiologist’s advice and set up an appointment. The first time House met Davidson, he told her that he suspected she had a brain tumor, but he wanted to conduct some tests to confirm his diagnosis, and the test would require that she be hospitalized. ‘‘They took fluid out of my spine. It was a horrible test,’’ said Davidson. ‘‘Dr. House came in the next day and said, ‘You have a brain tumor and it has to come out.’ ’’ That was in 1964. The tumor, which was located near Davidson’s auditory nerve, was successfully removed, but in the process the auditory nerve had to be severed, completely eliminating what little hearing she had in her right ear. Yet for ten years following the surgery, Davidson had no further symptoms. During that period, she moved to Colorado and was seeing another physician. Then, the hearing in her left ear, the good one, started to diminish to the point that she had trouble hearing the telephone ring. Her local doctor told her he suspected another tumor, but she refused to listen. Instead, she stopped going to him. ‘‘I had a cold. That’s what I kept telling myself. It’s going to get better,’’ said Davidson. But it didn’t get better. Eventually, the obvious could not be denied, so she called William House and made an appointment. When she got to the Otologic Medical Group, a battery of tests were immediately begun, but the diagnosis was so obvious they were never completed. Following the first test, Davidson was on her way to the X-ray department when she was stopped in the stairwell and told she didn’t need the X-rays, that Dr. House would see 130 Shattered Nerves her immediately. As she entered his o≈ce, she blurted out the inevitable: ‘‘Dr. House, I have another tumor don’t I...