Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door, let's go

Today I went to my regular clinic and got my pneumococcal meningitis vaccine.  I'm building up immunity even as I type. On Monday I have my pre-op checkup with my primary care doctor.   I'm almost at the point of looking past the surgery to the really big day:  activation. I try not to invest too much in the actual day of activation because it may take some time to begin understanding speech clearly, but really, just being able to hear SOMETHING in that useless right ear will be enormous progress and a wonderful step forward. The number of people who've put me on this path is quite large, from my regular doctor, to the new ENT and audiologist, to the UofM clinic surgeon and audiologist and now their surgery coordinator, who was awesome the last couple of days.  People can really be wonderful.

Remember how I said I don't like to wait?  Someone seems to have heard that. Turns out that my surgeon had a day open up in her schedule and I'm now going to have my first surgery on April 13.  I've scheduled a pre-op exam with my regular doctor for Monday and will get the meningitis vaccine then too. holy moly Seriously, this is going to happen.  I haven't even come down from hearing I had the authorization last night and now it's really moving fast.    This is so exciting.   holy moly

...... just got real.  Really real.  We came home from dinner and there was a message on the answering machine; Ron listened to it (of course) and it was Dr. H's office at the U.  They received the authorization for my implantation surgery. I haven't got MY letter yet; and I'd like to, because it will confirm what's paid for.  But.....this is going to happen.  The message said that they're currently scheduling for June, so it's not as fast as I'd hoped, but we'll see.  I don't know if that's OR schedules or the doctor's.  If it's the OR it might change when I tell her I want to do one at a time. Holy shit. As my brother said when I told him about this, I'm going to be a cyborg.

I've spent this week living instead of worrying.  You know, going to work, figuring things out.  Helping some people in the plant learn a new task.  Added a stop at a second facility to my business trip to Columbia (it's in northern Iowa and so on the way home).   Basically, trying not to obsess about what's not even happening yet.  And as it so often does, my mind sort of kept on with the CI dialogue without my conscious participation, and I realized yesterday that I've pretty much decided to go ahead and do this sequentially.  On a logical basis I know that the risk is very low that I'd end up completely deaf and the CIs wouldn't help, but I also know that that particular outcome is not acceptable, and that I can't (to return to my FMEA analogy) mitigate the risk adequately. So yeah, just what the hell was I going on about anyway, knowing that?  Speed?  Getting it over all at once?  Not such a big deal in the scheme of things.  And having come to that

So this is getting interesting:  I had an email from my audiologist yesterday agreeing with the surgeon.  She said, you WILL get hearing from the CIs.  The question is how much and how fast. If so that makes most of the risk short-term, which changes my FMEA quite a lot.  I'd almost say that the risk is minor enough that I don't know if I feel the need to mitigate it. And at that point it's a whole new ballgame.   I'm still waiting on my insurance company, :::::tapping foot:::::-  oh quite patiently, yes indeed.  HA.  Not so much. I've scheduled a short business trip for two weeks from Monday on the theory that I should get it over with.  By that time I should have heard from insurance but could not have scheduled the surgery yet.  My doctor ordered the pneumococcal meningitis vaccine for me, which is required, and once I hear from insurance I have to schedule a pre-surgical checkup. :::::::TAPPING MY FOOT HERE, INSURANCE::::::

I have just come to the realization that part of the mental adjustment that I've had to make with coming to grips with this is that I've never really thought of myself as a person with a physical disability.  There's having a hearing impairment, and there's being essentially deaf, and at some point I crossed that line without really even thinking about it, or even realizing it.  You know, there's a difference between recognizing that I need what the ADA people call a Reasonable Accomodation (which comes mostly in the shape of avoiding the phone at all costs and getting people to repeat things for me in conference calls) and actually *thinking* about myself as having a disability.  It's weird.  Perceptions are weird, and I think how one thinks about oneself is particularly fraught, because it often involves not just physical things that happen to us, but who we are. Now I'm curious as to how people at work perceive me, but even though I'm willing to put

By the time this is over I'm going to have either proven the kindness and loyalty of the people around me, or I'm going to drive them right around the bend and they'll all be avoiding me. Every day I change my mind again:  risk immediate bilateral, or do them one at a time?  Is it worth the risk or should I be cautious?  If I choose to go bilateral all at once, I will, of course, shut up a lot more quickly one way or another. One thing that I find myself doing is trying to justify a long-term decision based on short-term issues, which is clearly nonsensical in the extreme.  I mean, look, I'll either go to Columbia (and yes, Missouri, not Latin America) in May or not.  And I may even end up going to Wroclaw before the end of the year, or, again, not.  But do I really think I should schedule implant surgery around that?  No, but  there you are. I suspect, and hope, that all of this is overwrought imaginings on my part and the year goes by  eventfully but without ext

I don't expect that I'll be posting daily here, but since I've started working my way through the issues facing me, I'm finding that articulating what I'm thinking here helps me sort through my options:  blogging as therapy!  My primary concern right now is, of course, the extent to which my insurance will pay for all of this.  Last weekend we were talking and my husband said that if they won't, we should do it anyway.  That rather freaked me out, not because I don't agree that it's important, but because it would have a fairly significant impact on my retirement savings, which is the only way I could raise that kind of money.  So yeah, really really hoping that insurance comes through.  I'm told it's extremely likely, and my maximum out of pocket on my plan is $5600/year, which is actually less than I'd have to pay for new hearing aids.   So I'm reasonably optimistic about that part, though I will say that waiting up to four weeks to

I'm about to embark on something that I think will be life-changing.  I've spent my life traveling, and I see life as a journey, so this is just a juke to the left:   the road curves up there, and I am going in another direction. I've been hard of hearing since birth, a sensorineural hearing loss that runs through our family - my mom had it, so does my brother, an aunt, some cousins.  We all say "what?" a lot.  It's also progressive (or regressive, I guess, really) and has been getting worse throughout my life.  Fifteen years ago I began to really struggle to hear on the phone; ten years or so ago I stopped using the phone handset at all and in the last five years or so I stopped even being able to understand voice mail messages.  Without context, word comprehension is really difficult for me. I have been to two movies in actual theaters in the last twenty years:  The Two Towers, and let's face it, I didn't need to hear that.  Read the book more th