Month: August 2021

Music

Post author By kahayes82
Post date August 23, 2021
2 Comments on Music

Memories and soundtracks

In college, we played a game called the song game. Four of my lifelong friends from Villanova lived in a large quad on the first floor of Simpson Hall and each of them had a computer and access to hundreds of songs—in 2000, Napster made it possible to download any song you wanted (not so legally) in seconds.

I was never very good at the game, but I really enjoyed it. One roommate would press play on a random song and everyone would try to be the first to call out the title and artist. The game could last 10 minutes or go on for an hour. Fierce competition would ensue. I never won, but I could often guess the song within a few seconds.

Key song game participants pictured here among Villanova friends at our wedding in 2009.

Fast forward ten years, the speakers in my car were up way too loud and new radio songs were impossible to understand without access to lyrics. If a new song came on the radio, I would switch the station. I played the same familiar music from our iPod over and over again. My brain knew all the lyrics and could round out the tune when certain sounds began to disappear. I could never have played the song game.

I really love music. I grew up dancing and around a family of piano players and singers. Dance grew increasingly hard for me until it became near impossible. Music went from being something I craved to something that annoyed me. It made me sad.

My cochlear implant has changed this for me. At activation, I wanted to test music streaming through my CI and companion Phonak Marvel hearing aid. This feature was one I was most excited to try. I read the testimonials of many CI users who said that Bluetooth streaming and AutoSence OS (the CI’s operating system) made music enjoyable for them again. So we configured my phone, opened Pandora, and gave it a try. Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud started to play. Only I could hear it. I could hear it!

It had been declining for twenty years. Ten years of nonsense, ten years without words. Five or so years without music, lyrics, sounds. Over the crackling speakers of my laptop, Ringo, Paul, John and George ceased the silence that afternoon. The Beatles, one of the last bands Mom ever fully enjoyed, became one of Mom’s first new sounds post cochlear implant.

From my grandparents’ porch you could hear the crickets. You could smell the freshly cut grass and dinner on the neighbors’ grills. The yellow forsythia bushes lining the yard looked up to the blue fading into pink sky. We had exhausted the Beatles CD. Erin pulled a second CD from a bag, Anne Murray’s Greatest Hits.

“Track 11!” Erin said, as I put the CD into my laptop. I pressed play. We waited. Mom’s face confirmed recognition. The country waltz filled the room. Mom started to hum to the tune, loosely corresponding with the music as it played. Dad helped with the words to the chorus. Then, the second time it played through, Mom hummed and sang what she recognized: “Could I have this dance for the rest of my life?” My parents’ wedding song.

All the way home, and the next day, and for many days and weeks and years after that afternoon on the porch, Mom listened to this song. That day, every note brought back a memory. And with every note now, a new memory attaches to it. The quality of Mom’s life has been restored back to the clarity of Anne Murray’s voice the day she danced with Dad at her wedding.

It’s been twenty years since those song games in Simpson Hall. I’m playing my own song game these days. Kate’s extraordinary playlist, if you will. It includes my favorite songs and the last songs I remember hearing, really hearing. These songs can ground my ears after lots of listening and noise. My brain doesn’t have to work very hard. I can hear each lyric, the nuances of the signer’s voice, the notes, the individual instruments that compose the song. I hear harmonies I had forgotten, replaying versions of Hallelujah to hear “the fourth, the fifth, the minor falls, the major lifts.” So gorgeous. The clarity astounds me. Takes my breath away.

I listen to new songs that my kids love, too. (Dance Monkey, really?) Oldies that make me think of summers on the Cape singing with my cousins. Songs that bring back memories of high school friends belting out tunes in the backyard. Songs that take me right back to sitting on my dorm floor with my roomies singing along, knowing all the lyrics.

For me, some of my happiest moments have a soundtrack.

Slow healing

“Rather than gold-plating grit and trying to make failure fashionable, we’d be better off learning how to recognize the beauty in truth and tenacity.”
Brene Brown, Rising Strong

There is nothing fashionable about spitting stitches. Yes, this is actually something that can happen after any surgery. My body “spit out” the sutures behind my ear rather than let them dissolve. This has been painful, relentless, and just gross. It keeps the incision from fully healing and, at times, has looked like a dreaded infection.

To say this has caused anxiety is an understatement. When it first happened, my worst-case scenario thoughts let my mind run wild. However, a few weeks after surgery, consultations with both my surgeon and a family friend helped explain this phenomenon and ease my worries slightly. This unexpected event seems to have slowed. However, because of it, I had to creatively modify my external CI technology.

With the help of my audiologist and using a processor clip, I’ve configured a way to wear my processor in my hair. I have clipped it on my left side, wound the cord around my bun, and then connected the magnetic head piece on my right. The longer cord was intended to clip to my shirt, but I found this constricted my movement. In this configuration, the microphone is on my headpiece. Not perfect, but it’s working. Perhaps even fashionable? I refer to this style as my electronic hair accessory look.

Despite Mom having CI surgery twice, the recovery has surprised me. There was much pre-surgery chatter about how different the surgery is now verses 20 and 12 years ago, significantly downplaying the recovery to a small incision and moderate headache. While I hope this is true for most, it was not my experience.

Looking back at Mom’s story, it was not her reality either, though in our 104 pages of writing, we devoted only five sentences to surgery recovery.

As the medicine wore off, the pain increased. I felt dizzy, progressively more nauseas, and sudden movement strained my stitches. My jaw hurt and I heard an uncontrollable and inexplicable roaring in my ears. The worst part—I was lonely. I missed my children and Mike, who were back in Connecticut, awaiting my homecoming.

It’s brief; however, it’s remarkable how these sentences capture much of my experience as well. (More on dizziness and roaring sound soon.) Just as Mom missed us, I missed my crew too. Though I think they would tell you it was one of the best weeks of their lives.

Between trips to both grandparents’ homes and nonstop fun with Auntie B and Uncle Jonny, my support system kept the kids busy and their minds off their my healing. Auntie B even celebrated her birthday with us and stood in for me at the first grade mother’s day tea while wearing a hot pink scrunchie of Addie’s choice. Highly fashionable!

I am endlessly grateful for their support throughout my healing.

Challenges Cochlear Implant

Keep on writing

Hi there. I’m still here. It’s been an arduous yet exceptional couple of months.

When I started this blog, I believed it would be a way to write about change and showcase positive, exciting gains of cochlear implant hearing. And it would bring awareness to hearing loss and deafness, and to what’s possible and what’s different. I thought I would write thoughtful stories about generations of people grappling with hearing challenges and ultimately triumphing and that these would inspire. And while I still think that’s true, in optimistic fashion, I didn’t consider what I would do with setbacks.

After the initial high of activation, the past three months have been unexpectedly hard. And it has taken me some time to figure out how to write about it. I have found myself waiting for the challenges to resolve themselves in positive endings before I want to write the story. A story that would go like: it WAS hard but NOW I’m here.

As I often do, I looked for something to read and inform my mindset. I picked up Brené Brown’s Rising Strong and read about “gold-plating grit.” In her introduction, she talks about this tendency:

“…rarely do we see wounds that are in the process of healing….We much prefer stories about falling and rising to be inspirational and sanitized…. We like stories to move quickly through the dark so we can get to the sweeping redemptive ending.”

In my drafts folder are quite a few posts just waiting for happy endings. They’re standing in the way of other posts that share incremental gains and observations of my new hearing with a CI. Reflections on my kids’ voices and memories of music, Bluetooth therapy and thrillingly easy conversations at outdoor concerts.

So as the title of my blog reminds me, I’m in pursuit. Let’s get back to posting and here’s to unresolved setbacks and the gritty parts of the story that I’d rather breeze past.