The Hollow Ear

Oh I can hear you. Yes I can. I can hear you and everything else in the landscape too.

But what is all this deafening pressure in the right side of my head?
And if not Osama Bin Laden eating pop-rocks, and if not the Morton Salt Girl stomping around in my attic, and if not an African parasite eating my brain like it's potato chips, what is this?

This, whatever it is, started in September 2010, and an ER visit and a CT scan and an MRI have not given many answers. My internet searches have yielded so many clues and questions and so few answers. Since September I have seen three separate general practice doctors, one ER doc, one neurologist, one naturopath, and one ENT specialist and these many visits have yielded no diagnosis. And here I am.

Today makes three weeks on the antibiotics and this is as far as I can go with those for now. I am not sure that they have had any effect at all. Perhaps that information will be useful to the doctor. I have applied heat as he has recommended also. It comforts but it does not cure.

What would cause this immense pressure in the right side of head? Coupled with the sound and feeling of something sloshing about? And the extreme sense that the whole side of my head needs to pop, not just my ear? And the dizziness which makes me eat goldfish crackers and drink coca cola or hot ginger tea to combat the ensuing queasiness?
And what fluids could there be in there moving around so much? What is there? Blood? Salt water? Cerebrospinal fluid?

The noise and pressure and dizziness make it seem like there is a shipwreck in my head.

The sailors are manning the lifeboats. They paddle forward. They paddle backwards. There is no way out.

Maybe I need to eat a lot of pepper, re enact some scene from Jonah and the whale. Or was that Pinocchio in the whale?

Do I need a massive dose of horseradish?

Trepanation?

And I am not deaf though my ear feels utterly deafened. Instead I am almost hyper acute to sounds, but they are not pure, they are somewhat distorted, and sometimes horrifically amplified.

In December my doctor taught me that there was a word for at least this one symptom.
Hyperacusis.

And maybe that is why for the past few years when the leafblowers have been circling my neighborhood I have almost been driven to murder-suicide. I have always experienced having a keen sense of hearing.
What has changed now, since September, is that my echolocation is totally broken. I can hear so many sounds but they are not in right proportion, and I cannot tell where they are coming from.

It’s almost like having blind ears.