Life After Deaf by Noel Holston

Author:Noel Holston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510746886
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Here Comes the Night

While my waking hours were a constant quest to match sounds I detected to whichever creature or kitchen appliance was making them, my nights were an auditory void. Bedtime is a strange time for the cochlear-implant dependent, a stretch of peace and paranoia. When you remove the processor from the side of your skull and detach the magnet, you are deaf as a stone. It may not sound like such a bad thing, and in some regards that’s true. More than once, Marty griped over morning coffee and raisin bran about our neighbor’s “damn dog,” barking all night. To which I could honestly say, “What dog?”

Dogs, late-night parties next door, hospital helicopters passing overhead, car alarms—none of it was audible to someone like me when I was unplugged. Then again, neither are tornado sirens, smoke alarms, or the sound of our cats rampaging through the house, knocking over vases and lamps.

Years before I achieved this condition, I wrote a song about insomnia that I called “Maybe It’s the Snakes.” It’s partly a litany of things that you hear or imagine you hear because you can’t sleep—or that in fact keep you awake.

“Maybe it’s the faucet/dripping down the drain/maybe it’s the wailing/in the distance of a train.” The title comes from another couplet: “Maybe it’s the spiders/maybe it’s the snakes/maybe it’s that growling sound/the ’frigerator makes.”

At the time I wrote it, I kind of dreaded things that go bump or hiss in the night. Now, I longed for them.

Without my artificial ears on, there was nothing there but me and my thoughts. I couldn’t wear my left-ear hearing aid to bed. If I rolled over to my left side and pinned it to my pillow, it squealed. The cochlear implant on the other side didn’t make that delightful stuck-pig sound, but rolling over and dragging it across the pillow case created a magnified scratching like a club DJ working a turntable. Psst-tish, sisk-tish, sisk-tish, psst-tish. Not pleasant, even if you’re into hip-hop. And besides, fourteen or fifteen waking hours of having the magnetic cap stuck to your noggin takes a toll. The robotized-sounding voices, the overamplified crash of cabinet doors and cutlery, the roar of white noise at the grocery store or the coffee shop—it gets old. The processor seated behind your outer ear, light though it is, can still leave the skin feeling rubbed raw and sore. The magnet pinches after a while. You need to be detached. You need some quiet time. Or at least you think you do.

Sleeping is fine, the faster it comes and the deeper the better. You may even dream you can hear. But to wake up at three in the morning and not be able to conk out again for an hour or two is like being in a sensory deprivation tank. You’re not only deaf, but you are circumstantially blind. Sure, you could turn the lights on, but then your odds of regaining unconsciousness drop off considerably. So you

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.