Awareness comes on a panicked gasp.
Dark, amorphous fragments of memory fall away before I can catch hold of them.
My heart is racing.
Dread presses down on my chest, making it hard to take a full breath.
Fractured thoughts race through my mind.
Something’s wrong.
I don’t feel right.
What happened?
And the most terrifying of all.
Why can’t I remember?
My lids feel weighted, almost too heavy to lift.
My limbs feel detached from my body.
I command my arm to move, but it resists.
What happened to me?
Frantic drumbeats speed up their staccato rhythm in my chest; a silent pulse I can feel but not hear.
A terrified thought slams into me.
I can’t hear anything.
Amid my panic, I’m tossed back to the past.
When I lived in a world of claustrophobic silence.
When all the things I used to hear—my mother humming in the kitchen while she cooked, my dad’s cheers whenever the Steelers got a touchdown, the birds chattering outside my bedroom window—were stolen from me.
When I first started to lose my hearing, I thought I was imagining things. But days later, after everything had dulled to an unintelligible buzz, I couldn’t ignore the reality of it anymore.
A rare complication of chickenpox, the doctor explained. In dual strokes of bad luck, I not only contracted chickenpox only weeks before I was due to be vaccinated, but I ended up with Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, a condition typically found in adults over sixty.
And, unfortunately, fourteen-year-old me.
Instead of enjoying my freshman year of high school, I had to divide my after school time between specialist appointments and working with a tutor to learn ASL. All the plans I had—drama club, the school newspaper, joining a sports team, making new friends—had to take a backseat to my recovery.
Except I couldn’t recover. All the other unpleasant side effects of Ramsay Hunt went away, like the embarrassing facial paralysis and the rash around my ear, but my hearing? That was gone for good.
Wait.
But it’s not, though, is it?
I have my implants. The devices that brought back a sense of normalcy when I was seventeen. The devices that allow me to talk to my patients, to have conversations with the cashier at the grocery store, to meet people without fear of judgement.
But if I have them, why can’t I hear?
Why does it feel like I’m trapped in a bubble insulated with thick walls of cotton?
