The first thing nobody tells you about losing your hearing: you don't lose the sound. You gain one.
People think tinnitus is one sound. After nearly eleven years with mine, I can tell you it has moods.
Everyone showers. Almost no one has thought about what it's like when the water only makes sound on one side.
You can be in every photo, at every table, surrounded by people who love you, and yet be completely alone. Here is how.
When it happens, you worship the doctors. Some of them know far less than they let you believe. This is the thing I wish someone had told me on day one.
A needle through the eardrum is almost painless. It is what comes after that is strange. And the hardest part was not the needle at all.
You sit in the quietest room you have ever been in, focus everything on your dead ear, and wait for a sound you already know will not come. I have done it fifteen times.
They offered me a chance to quiet the sound. It meant surgery, a device in my skull, and a machine's version of hearing. I said no. Here is why, and why that is not advice.
The sound is loudest exactly when the world goes quiet. So the reward for a peaceful moment is the cruellest noise of the day.
Going to sleep means removing every sound in the room. Which means handing Miss T the microphone, alone, every single night.
For years I fought the sound every single night. The night I stopped fighting it, and did the exact opposite, everything changed.
