Tinnitus Andronicus

Tinnitus Andronicus

Kevin McMullin

Ever since taking on the mantel of brain surgery récupèrent, I periodically am approached by a kindhearted friend offering to help “cannabisize” my condition using a bit of homegrown. “Tea,” we used to call it. Alternatively someone might bring me a tastefully selected item from a Colorado confectioner. I am always touched by these gestures. The kindness of friends has been a salve to my days and a revelation to my soul.

The thing is, I’m not really a drug guy. I take aspirin reluctantly. Even back in the day, my mind altering experimentation was relatively tame.  And though it was, for the most part, enjoyable, it didn’t improve my life much. When I became a parent I resolved that I would not miss a moment of that exquisite journey by being experientially impaired. Drugs be gone.

There is, however, more than one way to alter consciousness. Since the onset of my neuroma symptoms, I have been immersed in a life of nearly constant hallucination. There’s the dizziness, a kinesthetic hallucination of motion-that-isn’t-really-happening.

Dizziness, I learned very quickly, comes in a variety of flavors. There’s the kind of dizziness where the room spins around. I don’t have that. My dizziness is more like the feeling of an elevator starting its downward trajectory. I’m never quite sure of the ground and feel like I ought to be wearing a parachute at all times.  I get a little bit of lightheadedness thrown in once in awhile. And disequilibrium, the sense that I’m going to fall while walking. The feeling is much more common than the event.

Plus there’s the tinnitus. A fairly common auditory hallucination. My right, “deaf” ear does the honors. (Well… actually, it’s not my ear doing it at all. The nerve between my ear and my brain has been severed so there’s no way for that now useless orifice to report any kind of noise, real or illusory. I picture the parts over there on the right side of my head: the ear drum, the cochlea; the malleus, incus and stapes; the organ of Corti. Suddenly they find themselves marooned. Cut off from friends and family. They’ve lost touch with everything they’ve ever known. Stranded, as it were, in a distant galaxy. Abandoned and neglected, the norms of civilization begin to break down. Tempers flare. A Jacobean conflict erupts. Malleus hurls an insult at Stapes, the irate Incus draws his sword. There is a tragic bloodbath… ah. Forgive me, I digress.)

My ear, then, is not the active hallucinater. It is my brain that is making stuff up. As usual. I suppose I’m just not ready to give up on hearing in stereo. For whatever reason, the sounds engineered by my over active auditory imagination are quite dynamic, made up of continuous hisses and rings in an assortment of alternating microphonic feedback loops. These sound tracks vary in relative volume with each other, providing me with a kind of slow, ongoing, Milton Babbit Kyrie. I have undertaken to see if I can do anything to rewire my brain so that I will stop hearing these sounds. It’s a tricky bit of business. (Try not hearing something sometime.) Still, with the right kind of focused attention, I find that I am increasingly able to bring the volume of these faux frequencies down (and up!). This is much easier to do when I am lying down after sleep. It takes a lot of concentration. I haven’t had much luck at it while I’m actually living my life.

In addition to the tinnitus, my poor auditory center, desperate to find work, occasionally registers bogus buzzes. These range in timbre from insectoid “bzzzts” to the more ominous thrum of Darth Vader engaging his light saber. The sounds are quick and sometimes accompanied by a sense of electric shock, originating in my brain and reaching out to various parts of – or sometimes my entire – body. The buzzes were much more common immediately after my surgery, but I am still getting them a year later. They come more often immediately after sleep or sometimes, when I am tired, during meditation. My brain surgeon tells me that this is completely normal. Really. I’ll give you his phone number.

In addition to these hallucinations, I often find myself perceiving the world as though I were submerged in 2-6 feet of water. Sights and sounds take on a distant, sort of foggy aspect. Again, this soggy, foggy feeling has become much less frequent since surgery. But fatigue or a complex soundscape can bring it on smashingly fast. And oddly enough, living in a hallucinogenic world is rather tiring.

It didn’t help that during recovery from my surgery the Republican and Democratic national conventions were playing on television. And I have to say that the news since then has done nothing to restore a sense of reality. I’m not altogether convinced even now that I won’t suddenly wake to find that the whole thing has been a horrible nightmare.

With all of this, it may not surprise the reader to learn that – my taste for psychotropic “tripping” being tepid to begin with – I am not anxious to intensify the already surreal world I live in, using artificial means. Legal or otherwise.

Dizziness drugs, a neurologist once explained to me, don’t keep you from being dizzy. They just make you not care that you’re dizzy. Alcohol will do that at least as effectively and quite a bit more cheaply. I have tried alcohol. And it did make the dizziness more bearable before surgery but, for some reason, seems to be ineffectual now that the tumor is out. I’m told that nicotine can really help you focus, but taking up smoking seems like a bad idea. Still, as my father said to me recently, “I’m stuck with this idea that I ought to feel good.” So I continued searching.

A little late-in-life experimentation has led me be to… tea! The kind with caffeine.  A tame but efficacious choice, when properly employed. It helps my fatigue, keeps me reasonably alert and even helps with the dizziness. Sometimes.

The crash from a cappuccino buzz has always been a turnoff for me, as much as I like the flavor. But tea, with its amino acids and anti-oxidents  to soften the takeoff and the landing, hits the drug delivery sweet spot!! A cup of Jasmine following the Two Person Dance (what could be better after Tai Chi than Chai Tea!) Or a well steeped pot of excellent German Breakfast Tea to greet the dawn. Or a smoky lapsang souchong, lightly steeped on a fall day. These have become my go-to drugs for making it through all but the toughest Jacobean tragedies. It’s what Shakespeare would recommend.