Part II - A Long Weekend

February 25 - February 28

    A few phone calls were made and an appointment was made for the following day for an M.R.I. - on a Friday (Feb . 25), which meant waiting a whole weekend to get the results.  I was told no more nursing my baby - which was heart breaking, as any mother could imagine.  Then, he put me on a high dose of steroids and anti-viral medication.  He gave me a low dose of valium to help with the vertigo. 

   The ride home was strange - everything in my universe was turned upside down.  I didn't know who I was all of a sudden.  I couldn't figure out just how serious this was.  We got back to my parents house and there was my dad and husband - both smiling at me but obviously distraught.  Seeing solid figures in such a helpless position is difficult - that's when it hits you just how serious a situation really is.

   I went home that night thinking - ok, well, if this is my life then this is my life.  I need to get on with it.  So, I made bottles for the baby and gave my soon to be four year old a bath.  I tried to keep things normal.  Then, when the kids were in bed and nothing was left to do, I fell apart.  I was so scared, I was asking my husband - what if this is a tumor?  What if something bigger is going on here?  Am I going to die?  What will be going on this time next year?  Will my kids have a mother, or will things be back to normal, or will I be just deaf?  What is going to happen to everything I ever planned?  I tried to make myself feel better by reminding myself that the only problem I was having was with my ears - my hand-eye coordination was fine, my vision was fine, I wasn't confused or anything.  It worked in spurts, then I would go back to being scared and crying uncontrollably.  

    The next night, we left our kids with my parents, we just needed time to talk and to allow me to fall apart, I guess you would say, as needed without my daughter seeing me cry.  I was so scared and barely slept the whole weekend.  My husband kept doing research on "Sudden Hearing Loss" - it was on the paper my ENT had given us, and was all we had to go by.  I kept telling him to stop doing research on a cure until we found the diagnosis.  But, he kept looking things up, and found that Rush Limbaugh had the same thing - sudden hearing loss that was treated by a cochlear implant.  Implant?  What in the world are they talking about?  But, I have to say, although I wanted him to stop doing all this research on something we knew nothing about, it was good to know that there was help with this "implant" if my hearing loss did turn out to be permanent.  This was all so foreign to me and strange.  

    The next day was the M.R.I. - I was a little scared, and trying hard not to show it.  The only thing I knew about M.R.I.'s was that they were going to look at my brain - and I kept thinking - "they could find anything..." - (or they could find nothing, as my father probably would have joked back). 

   On Monday, February 28, I went back to the ENT - it was a good visit.  I had been so scared and had barely slept at all since the previous Thursday when all of this had started.  The doctor said the M.R.I. looked good - no M.S., no tumors, no fluid build-up anywhere.  A lot of things had been ruled out.  The blood work was also good - but all of this meant one thing - we still didn't know what was going on.  I think it is a sign of a good doctor when he knows when to pass you off to someone else.  He referred me to Chapel Hill, NC and this was the beginning of a long journey.

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