I've realised that i've mentioned a bit about my problems with my health before, but haven't fully gone into it before, so thought i'd try and set out the problem with my ears, and see how it affects me in everything, from conversation, through to language and grammar and everything...
Since the age of 6 months, I have been seeing consultants at hospital, regarding my hearing, it started because I didn't make any noise when I was crying, and I didn't respond to anything my mum said or did, unless she was looking me striaght in the eyes initially, the gp thought that I was mentally deficient (some people would still say that), however, eventually, he did get me referred the the lincoln ENT department, under the wonderfully named Mr Mallett (and, no, it wasn't Timmy).
The initial diagnosis was Severe Otitis Media, otherwise known as Glue Ear, meaning I had to have a pair of grommets put in my ear. Grommets are little plastic tubes, which are placed in your ear drum, and are meant to equalise out the pressure, and let your ear drain fully. These didn't work in the slightest, and my hearing got even worse than it had already been, and I had constant infections in my ears, nose, throat and lungs. As I was unable to hear, I couldn't speak properly, I could only hear my own voice through the vibrations across my skull, so, on the few occasions I did speak, I had an extremely nasal voice, which couldn't vocalise words properly. You know how people sou.d when they have a bad cold? Imagine that, but twenty times worse. Almost anything I had to do with my mouth, opening, trying to talk, chewing, led to incredible pain in my ears.
At this point, my head appeared to say that anything that involved grammar, punctuation etc would be too hard for me, coz I couldn't hear teachers properly, so I just read and read, and picked stuff up from there (both correct grammar, and definitely incorrect) and, I also decided that maths was the way forward, because you don't need any rules of grammar at all for that.
Through the next 10 years, I had 13 pairs of grommets, and 3 pairs of T-Tubes (the larger version of grommets) put in my ears, however, this did not stoo the infections at all.
When I was 12, me, my mum and my sister moved to Key West in Florida (to get away from the uk, in my mums words), and I loved every single bit of it, apart from the heat (i think this is the reason why I love cold weather even to this day), however, we had to move back to the UK in April 1995. The reason why? The ongoing problems with my ears made it prohibitively expensive to get Health Insurance.
2 months after coming back to the UK, I was booked in for an operation that I still call to this day "Scrape and Sculpt." This involved the entirety of my ears nose and throat being "scraped" to try and remove all the infection from it, and then rebuilt. By rebuilt I meab grafts from other parts of my body put in place to replace all the stuff that was scraped out. This was an 18hr long operation, and I was on morphine for 6 months afterwards. I think that this may be where I got my liking for various mind altering substances from...
During my time off, I moved further and further ahead of people my age in matbs, eventually doing my GCSE 2 years early, and getting an incredibly high score, this was only 4 months after I started back in school.
I also got referred for intensive speech therapy, which did get my voice working to a good standard, no longer as nasal, but still quite so. Some people have said that since then, I have been trying to catch up on the 14 years or so not able to speak properly (I prefer just saying that i'm a gobby little shite)
Over the next few years, I had to go back into hospital on a few occasions, for touch ups to various bits of my auditory system, I was also diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, something that had been previously covered up by my lack of hearing. I find it incredibly hard.to tell peoples moods/reactions via their facial expressions, and that coupled with not.good hearing doesn't make for a good result, which is one of the reasons that, where I can, I prefer to communicate electronically.
When I turned 18, Mr Mallett decided that I should have a Hearing Aid. I had this fitted in the last term of my Upper Sixth, and, me being me, I kept on putting it down somewhere, and forgetting where it was (I'm exactly the same with glasses). I had a fucking amazing summer, including heading off to Leeds Festival 2000, gaining the nickname of Captain Vandalism, and being banned for life.
I then headed off to Manchester, to do a ohysics with astrophysics degree, where I received funding to get a minidisc recorder (to record lectures) and a computer with speech to Text capability. Me being Me, this never got used, as, for some strange reason, I never ever turned upto lectures...My hearing aid also didn't get used after freshers week, as it fell out of my pocket, somewhere, in manchester, and was never ever found again.
A bit of a side note now, but, even thougb I have had these problems with my ears, I have been going to gigs regularly since I was 14, at last count, I was on over 600. I love gigs, and my preferred place to stand is about 5-10 people from the front, by the left hand speakers . At gigs, it doesn't matter that my hearing is shit, coz the music is so loud, and I can feel the music through my entire body as well.
Back to manchester now, I managed to bluff my way through 2 years, before being asked "not to come back". I think i'd managed to turn up to 6 lectures in that time. The main reason I was asked not to come back though was that my Lab Tutor, who has been all over tv this week, as a copresenter of BBC Stargazing Live, took a dislike to me, and refused to give me a pass mark, even though there were 10 other people in the same boat as me, and he passed them all. I still think that B***n C*x is the biggest cunt on the planet...
I then started doing temp work around manchester, before falling into a job I was manifestly unsuited for, a Call Centre worker for Barclaycard...I managed to last 6 months there, before I fell into a massive massive depression, which eventually caused me to have to move back to the depths of the Lincolnshire Fens. Luckily, by this point, after 4 years of refusing to go back to hospital, I had got a referral to Manchester Royal Infirmary. I say luckily, because within 2 months of my initial appointment, I had been booked in by the lovely Mr Kevin Green, the ENT Consultant there (who is apparently rated as one of the top ENT specialists in Europe) for another big operation...
This one was a bit different all my previous ones, on the very very first inspection of my ear by Mr. Green, he found a Non-Malignant growth, in both Ears called a Cholesteatoma. Cholesteatomas form when the ear drum hasn't properly healed from some form of a rupture, and, instead of the skin on the ear drum growing outwards, it grows through the rupture, fills with infectious matter, and then eats its way through the structures behind it. In some cases, the packet bwhind the ear drum keeps itself clear of infection, so it is safer to leave it alone (this was the case with my right ear), in other circumstances, it needs removing, and fast. In my left ear, the Cholesteatoma had completely eaten it's way through the Ossicles, and was 1/4mm away from touching my main facial nerve, where it ran through the Mastoid Bone. I was told that if I had left it another 2 months, I would have lost all taste, and all movement in the left hand side of my face. The other thing I wad told was that my previous consultant was a complete fuckup, as the growth would have been highly visible for at least 7 years...
I had the operation to fix it all (i still have a beautiful scar behind my left ear, which lets me know when the weather is going to change) and had my ossicles rebuilt (out of cartilage took from my outer ear) and my eardrum renovated, this time from tissue taken from behind my earlobe. Before it got removed though, a fair few photos were taken, some of which are currently extremely high on the google image rankings for cholesteatoma.
Back to lincolnshire I went after this operation, in absolute agony, but mr green refused to prescribe morphine for me ( :( ) instead, he very unofficially advised me that the best thing to help with the pain, was to smoke a lot of, what was by that point, one of my favourite substances, so, because I couldn't ignore what he was telling me, I got very very very very high, for a long long time. I did a few other jobs after this operation, none of which I was suited for...including one where I was regularly breathing in Fibreglass dust (no PPA equipment was provided). My hearing actually improved substantially after the op, to the point where I am now classed as only partially deaf instead of fully deaf.
Most people I meet do not realise I am deaf at all, unless I tell them, as I have got vwry very good at facing people when they are talking, so that I can add the slight bit of lipreading I can do, to the noises I can hear. Another reason I don't like twlling people on the whole is because of the vicious bullying I received, a common form, at secondary school was for people to slap me hard around the ear. This hurts at the best of time, but in my case, it caused absolute and utter agony, and I thnk it is because of this that I became pacifist. It's better for me to avoid any form of fighting, and run, rather than risk having something hit my ear.
I still have to go to the consultants, every 6 months, I travel up to manchester to see him, and will have to do so for the rest of my life. The problem with Cholesteatomas is that theynever fully go, they are always lying there hiding, waiting for an opportune moment to spring back up and fuck you over again. I also still get agonising pains running hrough my ears from time to time, often conneced with tinnitus, but, luckily, by now, I know my ears inside out, and I know whether the pain is something I need to go to the GPs about, or even ring mr green up about. My GP doesn't believe I have any problems with my ears (even though he has.copies of all of my medical notes) so it normally ends up being ringing Mr Green.
I know this has been a long read, but it's been something i've been meaning to write down for ages, and thought that this train journey was the perfect opportunity
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