Oh Say Can You Hear?

It started a few months back, when the flowers were starting to blossom and everybody in town, especially me, was sneezing a lot.  I woke up one morning and I could feel fluid in my left ear.  I figured it went along with the allergies and hay fever.  I took some decongestant and it cleared up quickly.

A couple of days later, the fluid was back again, and more decongestant cleared it up again.  Over the days, I started to get used to the full feeling in my ear and figured that when allergy season started to abate, it would go away.

When it didn't, I thought about making an appointment with my doctor but as I am very much like my mother, I kept putting it off.  In the meantime, I began to notice that I was having to turn the TV volume up higher, having to ask Walt and others to repeat things more than usual, and that it was now both ears, not just the left ear that were involved.

I should add here that both Walt and I have undiagnosed hearing problems.  Probably the thing we each say to each other more than anything else is WHAT??.  This has been going on for years and the difficulty I was having now just seemed a slight exacerbation of that problem.

But I started being unable to understand customers at LOGOS and would have to have them repeat.

Have you noticed that when you can't hear something and you ask someone to repeat it, 9 times out of 10 then do repeat it, but repeat it softer than the first time they said it? I had a woman the other day who had to repeat what she said four times (she also had a very heavy accent) and by the time she repeated it the fourth time, she was practically whispering.

A show I went to recently was so difficult to hear I probably missed 75% of the dialog.  This was not a good thing!  If I didn't find out what was going on, I would have to consider giving up the critic job.

I made a doctor's appointment, but she was out of town for a couple of weeks, so I didn't see her until today.  In truth, I fully expected to find out that I was just full of waxy build-up and that would be the end of it, but I wanted to be sure.

She checked my left ear, because that was the worst one and sure enough, big chunk of wax in there.  But the right ear was clear.  Hmmm.   The nurse spent a lot of time washing the wax out of the left ear.  Weird sensation, and we both ended up wet, but in the end, there was the culprit in the sink.

I noticed an immediate improvement in that ear, but the right ear still wasn't right, so I have an appointment tomorrow at Audiology in Sacramento to have a hearing test.  It may be I'm just old...

From the doctor's office, it was off to the  x-ray department where I had the dreaded mammogram, as you can see from this lovely selfie I took while sitting in a tiny box half undressed, waiting to be called for my turn to be squished.  

Yeah, I know they are a great diagnostic tool, but I don't know anybody who enjoys having a mammogram.  The closest I ever came to "enjoyment" was when I was working for Dr. G and he sent all his patients to a place, now closed because the doctor retired, called Mammographia, which Dr. G described as "the Cadillac of mammograms."

I gave the spiel so often I decided what I really needed was for them to give me a free mammogram so I could actually describe my experience.  To my surprise, they did it.  And it was.  Carpeted floors, heating pad on the tray where they put your breast, so you didn't have to have it squished between two ice cold plates of metal.  I don't know why, but the squishing wasn't as painful as it had always been before.

And when they found "something" on the mammogram, there was a doctor on site to do an ultrasound of the breast right away, to let me know that the "something" was nothing.  (I later found out Kaiser had been following it for years and just never told me.)  But it was the "Cadillac of mammograms," and probably had a cost to match, though I never did find out the cost compared to my utilitarian mammograms at Kaiser.

After the mammogram there was a blood test to be taken....took an interesting selfie thanks to the reflecting mirror in the corner of the lab.

And then off to the lab bathroom with my little jar, which I was to fill, put in the little bag, and leave behind the little door.  Since I had not been to the bathroom in more than three hours, this was no problem.

Finally I was finished.  I thought I was supposed to meet a SwapBot friend in Sacramento for lunch around 12:30, and was glad that I got confused on the dates (it's NEXT Monday) because it was 12:20 when I left Kaiser in Davis.  I was starving, so I decided to pop next door to IHOP and have a waffle.  I've been craving waffles for awhile and just hadn't felt like making any.   So I had a waffle, and it was a disappointment.  For a place that specializes in pancakes and waffles, this was a poor offering.

But I was able to leave behind a mystery envelope for a Swap Bot project...the envelope has a request that the finder write something in it and drop it in the mailbox (the envelope is stamped).  

I have left envelopes in several other places and don't know if I will ever find out of these envelopes are sent on because they are for someone in the midwest, and not addressed to me.  Someone somewhere else is leaving my envelopes around town.  So far I have not received any back.

So anyway, I still don't know about my hearing, though the left ear is better now.  And I'm off to Kaiser in Sacramento in the morning and hope to find out something while there.

Kaiser Sacramento is near Red Lobster.  TV ads keep telling me this is crab month.  My appointment is 11:45.  Hmmmm.....

Day 36:  Happiness is this still from a video Laurel posted.