Last week's chaotic good?
My ENT appointment.
As I mentioned before, I have been occasionally experiencing total hearing loss in my left ear. It lasts a few days, is sometimes a little painful, and is always accompanied by dizziness, but not to a debilitating degree. I talked to my neurosurgeon about it since it's been happening since my brain surgery. She wanted to get an audiogram to make sure that it was nothing to do with my hearing (and it isn't - but then again, I was not experiencing one of these episodes during the audiogram.)
As with all chaotic good lately, I didn't have to look for it because it presented itself immediately. I was in my appointment with my ENT, and he asked what was going on. You know my answer?
"I unapologetically use Q-Tips to clean my ears. This is not that." Good thing he was wearing a mask, but I'm 90% sure that if I had seen his entire face, he would've been scowling. I definitely heard a heavy sigh and when I called him out on it - as in, "I heard that heavy sigh" and he laughed - he said, "I don't have to tell you how dangerous that is for your ears." My response? "Nope! But that also won't stop me. Also I was cleaning my ear out with a Q-tip yesterday, and I hit something and it was so painful I had to sit down for a minute and almost blacked out."
He did a...we'll call it thorough exam of my ear canal. All the while talking in general about Q-tips. He definitely wanted to get the point across that under no circumstances should I be cleaning my ears out with them.
Message received. Still doing it. Just did it this morning, as a matter of fact.
We then had a rather humorous conversation about cranberry juice and I told him that if it was Meniere's disease, I'd choke it down every day if I had to. I effing hate cranberry juice. I also made the point that when I called him about this issue a few months ago and was told to drink said cranberry juice, that was hands down the weirdest medical advice I'd ever gotten, and he chuckled and was like "yeah, I get it."
During this discussion, he asked me some very thought-provoking questions and took a more thorough migraine history than any doctor I've ever had (yes offense, neurology team). I was confused why he was asking these questions, and so I asked! You know what he said? "Migraines don't just go away, Ryan. Your body changes, as yours has drastically over the past two years, and they shapeshift. But they don't just go away. I think you are having vestibular migraines."
I hadn't even put it together, but the pattern fits. I get them about as frequently as I was getting migraines before my brain surgery, and while the pain isn't there and the light sensitivity isn't either, I have a hunch that he's right based on the symptoms he rattled off about vestibular migraines.
Do I like this theory? I absolutely do not. I thought I hadn't had a migraine in four months, yet I'd had this problem about 11 times in that time period. His solution is a tricyclic antidepressant, oddly enough, but it's also used to prevent migraines. So, we're going to try that for a little while and see what happens.
In other news, this week's chaotic good was that my voice healed from the botox and the flu and the gross. I definitely belted out Lizzo in my car yesterday on my way home from work and I'm so stoked that I can't even. I won't overdo it. Yeah, that's a lie. This is the first time I've had a full voice in a year and a half, and I'm taking it for a ride until the filler wears off in a month and a half or so.
There's also my hair (which is so ridiculous and I currently look like Gilda Radner, but I absolutely love it) and the fact that there was a bat in one of my offices yesterday, and life has been full of shenanigans that are funny even when they're not funny.
This chaotic good thing is going to work out just fine.
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