Nancy Wait

Talks about her book, and about being an artist and a writer

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Update on Going Deaf in One Ear  – link

I am coming up to my fifth anniversary of going deaf in my left ear, a totally unexpected occurrence on Groundhogs Day 2005.  I woke up that morning with a strange ringing in my ear and shortly afterwards realized I couldn’t hear in my left ear.  How strange!  I assumed it was the temporary result of a cold.

Or, it could have been a wax build-up.  This is what I thought several days later when my ear was still blocked up and I made an appointment with the doctor.  My doctor cleaned the ear, but I still couldn’t hear a thing.  He sent me to a specialist.  The specialist gave me a course of steroids.  I loved being on steroids.  They gave me tons of energy.  I needed little sleep.  I got lots of things done that I had been putting off.

The problem with the steroids was when I went off them.  That was when I lost my balance and had such a bad case of vertigo I had to go to the Emergency Room.  I think I was in the hospital for a week.  They gave me steroids intravenously and the dose was so large I became psychotic!  I think that’s what they said.  All I remember is that I was singing at the top of my lungs at 4 in the morning.

It’s all ancient history now.  I’ve never had to have the operation because my tiny tiny acoustic neuroma hasn’t grown any bigger.  It was just there to cut off the hearing on my left side, forcing me to find a new balance, a new way of being in the world.

Five years later I no longer wonder why this happened to me, and I don’t usually think about trying to cure myself with visualizing white healing light.  I accept this condition.  Accept it totally.  When it first happened, my instinct was to read Louise Hay and practice the meditation, “I hear with love.”  That really worked!  It’s an on-going process of course.  But I’m usually able to catch myself right away when I react to something unpleasant, turning my resentment around to acceptance and loving understanding lickety-split.

Why I am writing this update now is because another factor has come into play, one that seems vitally important to my consciousness at  present.  Because I am beginning to understand my loss of hearing on a different level.  I know that I create my reality.  I know this.  So why would I choose to go deaf in one ear?  A permanent condition, unalterable apparently.  Well, look at it this way.  What if there was a person who was so very sensitive to everything, and especially to noise, that life became extremely stressful?  And she had no idea how to remove herself from that noise as it followed her everywhere.  If you were her guardian angel, don’t you think it might be nicer for her if you cut off her hearing at least in one ear?  So at least when she lay her head down on the pillow, deaf side up, sounds would be muffled?

But wait, there’s more.  The above is what I have become used to thinking over the years.  It’s only lately that something new has entered in.  Because in effect what has happened is that I now have one side for hearing the world, and one side for listening to my inner voice.  If one side of you only hears – what to me sounds like when you hold a sea shell up to your ear – it is a reminder, a constant reminder, to listen to my inner self, my own inner voice.

The outer world and its sounds have come to seem a separate thing from what goes on inside me.  Growth and development in consciousness is always personal, always completely relevant and specific to us as individuals, no matter how much we have in common with others.  So, at times there is a need to let go of the self and experience our oneness with other people, and at other times we need to go within and separate ourselves from what is happening around us.  There were many years when I came to see separateness as a dirty word.  Well, not exactly dirty, but definitely misguided and backward.  But lately things have become more blended.  I see concentric circles spiraling out from one another.  I experience Oneness already, so there is no longer any need to remind myself of it.  Instead, I can move back (or forward or sideways) into the place of also experiencing my own uniqueness.

Having one side of my head totally deaf to the world around me is an incredible gift!  It is a constant reminder that I am in the world, and also not of it!  I am someplace else as well.  A place that feels very right to me.  In other words, I have come to see this whole experience of partial deafness as an enormous blessing~~~~~ 

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