Song Without Words by Gerald Shea

Author:Gerald Shea [Shea, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306821943
Publisher: Da Capo Press

CHAPTER 16

A BRAIN ON OVERTIME

I MORE OR LESS HID MY FIRST TWO DAYS BACK AT Mobil after the session with Dr. Alexander, saying little but watching others carefully at meetings or at lunch, listening uncertainly. I began to realize that I understood little if I avoided people’s eyes and lips. I made an appointment at P & S, Columbia’s College of Physicians & Surgeons—north of mourningside, I thought as I made my way uptown in a taxi and remembered Mary as I passed the New York Hospital Nurses’ Residence on 70th Street.

P & S is so far north, at 168th Street, that it seems not in the city. I had an appointment with Raymond Chang, the chief ear doctor—I wasn’t quite ready for a neurologist—whose office was in the administration building, a tiny place compared to Salem Hospital. Chang was a jovial man. He was born, I later learned, of Chinese parents and educated at Columbia. He spoke with a slight accent when he laughed—and he laughed often. His audiologist did the audiogram first and then led me to his office. He looked at all of the tests—Mobil’s, Salem’s, and his own audiologist’s. “Aha!—Mr.—Shea—I—see!” He spoke slowly and loudly, no doubt an acquired habit.

“What do you think?”

“Not good, not good! You’re pretty deaf, to speak bluntly. Or pretty hearing impaired, to be berpity a wreck.” berpity perfidy perfectly

“Perfectly a wreck?”

“No! My accent sometimes. Politically correct. Though today the deaf prefer the word ‘deaf’—they are probably right.”

“So—I’m pretty deaf?”

“Yes. Pretty deaf. Not profoundly deaf. You hear my voice. Very good.”

“Yes, I do, of course.”

Chang leaned over his desk, now four feet from me, lips up, aimed at my eyes. He closed the curtain behind him. “Daylight behind not a help. But you’re severely deaf, Mr. Shea. In those high tones anyway—you don’t hear consonants. A I O U you hear pretty good, except the high parts of them. E maybe no. But G H K N P Q R S T V X etcetera—you don’t hear at all. Receptors dead. Many airedales dead.”

“Airedales?”

“Hair cells! Epic eely hotels, Latin for ‘hair.’”

“Epic eely hotels?”

“Epithelial cells. Tiny cells that interpret sounds, even amplify them.”

“The doctor in Boston—in Salem—thought I should be checked for a tumor.”

“Tumor. Tumor! Ha ha.” I started to laugh along with him. He was laughing, I hoped, because he thought Alexander’s concerns way off the mark and, I think, because he wanted me to focus on the good news.

“So I don’t have a brain tumor.”

“No, no, Gerald—Gerry? Yes, Gerry, good! You have two ears. If you had a tumor, you’d have two. Twins! Identical twins, up there in your ears or in the nerve or in your brain, giving you same loss, both ears. Almost impossible—like two identical snowflakes, or fingerprints.”

“So what is it then?”

Chang stopped smiling.

“Listen, Gerry. Listen carefully. You have a fear censor in euro ear-ring loss.”

“I have—”

“Severe sensorineural hearing loss. You hear because you hear some vowels, sometimes many vowels, and you read lips, plus you use your brain.

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