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Steroids
The remaining weeks of July 2001 are a
blur of doctor's appointments and large machines peering intently into my
skull, happily mapping out my head's most secret contours in binary code.
I am tanked on steroids.
The best medical thought has it that my
little left cochlea is swollen and that messing significantly with my
hormones will make it feel better.
A few days after I come back from Tahoe
with broken ears, a neurotologist writes me a prescription for huge doses
of prednisone and tells me solemnly, "Don't make any life decisions
while you're taking this stuff."
I quickly find out why. When I take sixty
milligrams at exactly 10:30 in the morning, as per prescription, it's like
chugging a full thermos of coffee. My heart races. I start nervously
rubbing the back of my neck throughout the day. I pace around in tight
little circles while waiting for things to come out of the office printer.
My muscles start to feel tight and dense, and I begin compulsively flexing
my biceps, not because I want to build them up, but because they just want
to move, dammit.
But most of all, I'm some other, weird
person. I'm sobbing in my car, sobbing in bathrooms, sobbing on my couch
at home. To be sure, anyone would grieve for their lost ears and fear an
uncertain future, but these feelings are like a liquid red slash
flung across the beige fabric of my life.
Normally I am formal, correct,
restrained, a classic INTJ, the wryly funny analytic type. But the
prednisone has wrenched me as open as a conch shell.
Tiresias
Months later, on the morning of
activation, I am having breakfast with Paula in the Hobee's restaurant in
Palo Alto. We talk about those first few weeks after I lost my hearing.
"Now that I look back on it," I
say, "I'm finding it hard to recover what it felt like. Those
feelings of grief and fear were overwhelming. But I was in complete
overdrive from steroids. I'm not sure yet how much of that time I can
accept as being me."
Paula replies, "Now you know how it
feels to be a woman."
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