Waiting on Medicine and a Miracle

Tammy had asked me a few days ago if I'd be interested in going in for prayer with Pastor Pat Moe at Hosanna. I told her that I felt God could hear my prayers just fine from where I was at but I knew when I said that, that I really didn't mean it.

I was out walking the pups yesterday morning and feeling sad about my loss of hearing. I texted Tammy, "I'd like to go for prayer if we can". I knew she had a busy day with her mother planned but I hurried home and we made our way over to the church.

Pat is a beautiful woman who embodies everything that Jesus is asking us to be to one another. She's the primary reason for the outreach to the poor that emanates from Hosanna. She's a very humble woman who gives selflessly, always. We walked back to the prayer room where Pat anointed my ear with oil and began to pray over me as we all held hands. It was a moving experience and one that left me sobbing. It was a combination of a lot of things over this past year that brought me to my knees but mostly, it was just me surrendering to God and allowing his will to be done. Pat prayed that the power of medicine and miracles would come together to provide my healing. It was a very moving experience that Tammy and I were so thankful for.

I came home and needed to go out walking to collect my thoughts. There were so many things going through my mind. I found myself down along Crystal Lake and recalled a photo I'd taken on a bench there and uploaded to Facebook a couple summers ago. I titled it something about a "practice retirement day". And now it was real. I was no longer practicing. I was no longer captive to a work schedule that had me continually watching the clock even on my days off as I tried to accomplish all I needed to before my next work-week began. Couple that overwhelming sense of freedom with the profound sadness I was feeling about my hearing loss, and I again broke down in tears. That's not like me but this hasn't been easy and with everything else I've been dealing with in the past year, I think it all had just become too much for me in that moment.

I know there are much worse things to be afflicted with but until you've lost something as important to you as your hearing or even half of it, you can't begin to appreciate what that really means. You can try but you'll never be able to fully grasp it. My world seems less colorful now. It's a profound loss that I wish I could minimize but I'm unable to. And it's not just the loss of hearing; there's the constant ring of tinnitus that hasn't let up for me since this whole thing began. I was telling Tammy it's like having a conversation with her while the TV is on in the background with the volume more than loud enough to be annoying.

Is there a work-related connection to this? It's nothing I would pursue but I think there may be. I would advise others still in the trenches donning a headset each day to consider a headset that doesn't use an earpiece, just the foam ear covers. I spoke with a friend in my area of specialty who has total hearing loss in his left ear as well, the same ear he used to wear his earpiece in. He told me of another controller (supervisor now) who also experienced hearing loss in the same ear in which he wore his earpiece. And I received a PM last night from a controller who retired a few years ago who experienced 40% hearing loss in the ear he used for his earpiece. I think that's strong evidence for a correlation considering how we're a facility of fewer than 300 controllers yet the odds say that this condition afflicts on the order of 2-20 in 100,000.

I'd rather my blog was about something other than my health issues but I know of no better way to chronicle this stuff as it pertains to my life than to lay it out here. Perhaps others will be helped along the way. It's somewhat therapeutic as well but I'm very much looking forward to writing about my boring life and hope to be able to do that real soon.

It's been over 48 hours since the steroid injection into my middle ear and there's been no change. I just put in a call to Dr. Beatty's office out of desperation, not wanting to have to look back on this and be upset with myself for not doing all I could've done. The window of opportunity for doing whatever can be done before it's too late is quickly closing.

Continued here.