North Star Writers Group

Hearing is just as important to me as sight. My right brain sends me pictures so constantly that I have to shut them off to accomplish anything. When the original Star Wars film was first broadcast on a premium TV service I didn’t subscribe to, I listened to the free radio simulcast and my imagination supplied all the visuals I could possibly want.

I cannot bear the thought of not being able to soar to the strains of the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah, of never hearing the voice of God in a child’s giggle, or of not being able to notice and laugh at a mockingbird imitating a blue jay. How can we truly live without the occasional melodic cascade of a waterfall or the soft tinkling of wind chimes? Without the wild, mournful call of a loon across a lake, or the woodpecker’s rat-a-tat-tat puncturing the misty forest morning? Without hearing “I love you” from the ones we most love in return?

People who cannot hear sounds do live very well and successfully, but I don’t think I’m brave enough to join their ranks. I’m spoiled rotten. Without sound, I would feel very isolated and bereft.

Thus I was devastated to realize some time ago that I had lost most of the hearing in my left ear.

I put off doing something about it until earlier this year. Then my partner, who had a very bad feeling about my half-deaf state, put her foot down and made a deal with me. She would go back to the cardiologist to check up on her heart if I would get my hearing checked. She kept her part of the bargain, so I had to keep mine.

That’s when I was diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma. This is medical-speak for a non-cancerous tumor that grows out of Schwann cells, which are nerve cells in the ear that specialize in helping the brain turn vibrations into decipherable sounds. It’s not a common condition. Only about one in every 100,000 or so people grows an acoustic neuroma large enough to cause hearing loss, according to the Acoustic Neuroma Association.

This isn’t exactly the type of unique personal growth that I have pursued for two decades. Nonetheless, it is the kind I now face. An acoustic neuroma enlarges slowly but continuously. If it is not removed via surgery or radiation, it can, ultimately, be life-threatening.

Before I knew the precise physical agent of my hearing loss, I wondered about the more intangible causes. My worldview holds that physical disease reflects emotional, spiritual and mental disease. Ill health originates in the heart and spirit as well as the mind.

Lying in bed one night, trying to meditate and full of self-pity, I wailed silently, Why me? Why have I lost the hearing in one of my precious ears? An answer immediately filled my head. You never expect to hear the good news, so why do you need two ears?

Ouch! That shoe more than fit; it pinched painfully.

Until very recently, I always expected to hear only bad news, never anything positive. I was the perpetual pessimist, convinced I was simply being a realist.

Behind that conviction, however, was my deeply held belief that I was not worthy of good news, that I could expect nothing but bad from life.

I also know from my personal growth experiences that it takes more than a mental attitude adjustment to transform this type of deep belief. It takes a fundamental alteration of the very soul essence that we are.

I have undertaken that process of soul-deep personal change many times, and it has helped me free myself of many of my limiting beliefs, including the one about never being worthy of good news.

After all, there’s just as much chance of the news being good as there is of it being other than good. Why suffer from such a one-sided expectation? Why not open both ears to all the news – the not-so-good and the downright great?

So, head surgery, here I come. My expectation now is that I will come through surgery just fine, although the question of whether any hearing in my left ear can be saved remains unknown until the doctors pop the top, so to speak, and have a look at the actual tumor as opposed to the tumor’s image on the MRI.

I’m also collecting tumor humor. My punster-sister has already made cracks about the operation being the Schwann song for this tumor and highly nerve-wracking to boot.

If anyone has something else to add to my tumor humor collection, please pass it along. I’ll report the results after I recover from my date with the saw-bones.

(Editor’s note: Please e-mail your tumor jokes to Candace Talmadge at info@greenstoneofhealing.com.)

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