Today I got to see a doctor I seldom see and told him that there were only two people mentioned in my book whom I hadn’t given a copy to yet. And that I needed to fix that. I hadn’t referred to him and his wife by name in there, I said; last page, second paragraph. I was a brand new laceknitter way back when and I’d made them a wedding ring shawl on size 3 needles in white laceweight Ostrich Plumes.
Dr. M was the ENT who, eighteen years ago when my lupus was diagnosed, finally put together what had eluded everybody else for all those years: that my progressive hearing loss was due to an allergy to aspirin. I’d apparently triggered it with an overdose when I’d climbed into the medicine cabinet as a toddler and had eaten not quite enough baby aspirins to have to get my stomach pumped. It was a new bottle and Mom counted pills and fed me baking soda instead on doctor’s orders to neutralize the acid.
With the lupus, I had a new diagnosis and meds to have to take, but I went completely deaf on the prescription-strength Aleve. I have to tell you–you can close your eyes and try to see what it’s like to be blind, but you cannot close your ears. It was like nothing I could have expected: when someone talked to me, I felt waves of pain in my ears. But no sound. Nada. Except for the roaring white noise in my ears that didn’t respond to anything but itself.
Apparently Aleve (called Naprosyn then) was different enough from aspirin that I lucked out, but whatever, my hearing came back to what it had been when the dose wore off, and under Dr. M’s directions, I never took NSAIDs again.
And what he told me meant my kids wouldn’t go deaf in their teens too. And they did not.
And what he told me meant I didn’t have to go any more deaf. And I did not.
The man was right.
There is more to the story, related to when my Crohn’s was diagnosed ten years later, but this will do for here. Suffice it to say, I owed him, bigtime; that wedding ring shawl felt absolutely imperative to do. And it became one of those projects that I will forever rejoice that I knitted it: both for my own sake, and for the great joy of their reaction to it.
I signed and gave him a book today. And he signed my copy for me.