Given the caring response to my previous post, I’d like to thank everyone who read and offered supportive advice. Some of which I feel the need to further explain my situation.
When I was a child it was determined I was born with a very specific kidney issue. In vaguest terms, the kidney and bladder were poorly connected and the situation became dire when I was between three and four years old. I went septic three times before the exact medical issue was diagnosed. Most of my fourth year on this earth was spent back and forth between doctors and the hospital. A surgery and looooooong recovery later and I was a normal child once more. Or so we thought.
When you’re a small child and already don’t communicate quite as effectively as your peers, one pain easily cancels out any other especially when your abdomen feels like it’s housing a spiky little dragon that occasionally shoots fire through your tummy. It’s been a while but I still remember the pains. But the smaller irritating pain of my ears? That I didn’t mention because it didn’t feel like it mattered compared to the pain in my abdomen.
I was having almost constant ear infections, which continued into my early teen years. But my baseline for pain was skewed, it wasn’t until they got bad enough to cause a near constant fever, a symptom my parents could notice easily, that it was really found out.
Funnily enough, my hearing wasn’t badly effected quite yet but the scarring was significant enough to watch. It didn’t get better, and has continued to escalate in the last decade. I’m considered hard of hearing for the most part, my hearing is generally muffled more than just nonexistent.
So the real fun of it is hearing how much my hearing is deteriorating, every appointment for my ears the news is never good, unchanged is the best we can hope for but it feels like it’s worse now. I need to steel myself to handle that bad news again, it’s heartbreaking over and over.
I feel vibrations more keenly and read lips because as a kid when the damage started, that how I learned to communicate. My entire childhood I was constantly chided “inside voice” or “quiet voices please” when honestly I couldn’t gauge my volume. I honestly think I catch more than expected because of all this, and after years of fighting to figure out weird social things that were preprogrammed into my brain, I’m rather good at picking up on facial expressions and body language. It’s been urged I should learn some signs by my last doctor, though I’m only really able to curse effectively and finger spell for now.
I don’t tell all this for sympathy, just to explain my situation and why I’m reluctant to see the doctors right now. I promise I’ll go, I just need to find my bravery. But thanks for the support, it means a lot.
