Does anyone know how to find a doctor willing to make me deaf?
Honestly the thought has crossed my mind and assuming they were willing (I have absolutely no concrete research to back this up this is just my own logic from my background in anatomy and biology speaking) I don't think it would be possible surgery wise. With removing eardrums, that's all find and dandy, but a lot of the auditory stimulation we receive isn't picked up through our eardrum but is actually coming in from our temporal bones vibrating. This is why car rides can be such living hell for those of us with severe hyperacusis, our whole body is vibrating and stimulating the cochlea, not just the eardrum. This is also how cochlear implants work if you've seen those, the hearing aids with the magnets that go up on the sides of people's heads; they function by vibrating the temporal bone instead of the drum.
At my lowest point I considered asking my doctor if he could just drill a hole through my skull and just pump botox into my cochlea and paralyze it and give me a break for 3 months until the toxins wore off, but then I remembered that you know - I ain't no doctor - but I'm pretty sure the inner ear is embedded in the thickest part of the skull and that would be quite the hole.
I'm planning to commit suicide honestly.
I am very sorry. I'm not going to give you that "I know
exactly how you feel" bull crap, I hate when people say it to me. No one knows what it's like to lose
your life,
your identity, to lose who
you are. I should know, I lost
me for so long I was terrified I would never find myself again. There for a while all I you would see when you looked at me was a puffy eyed shadow of the girl I used to be, a pathetic excused for a person.
But to show you that there is hope, hear me out. Listen to my story.
My life was miserable. That's the only way to describe it honey cakes. I would stay up till 2 or 3 AM I didn't want to sleep, but I don't know if not sleeping was worse. Then in the morning I'd wake up too early but would have a pit in my stomach so heavy I felt I was going to sink right through the ground and fall forever.
And then I would cope. All day long. Extreme, awful, intense pain. Migraines, tinnitus, hyperacusis, depression, and now to frost the cake of this joke we have the audacity to call my life I'm developing visual snow. Life is misery.
But
I held on, and I found myself again. I'd say the moment it all changed for me was when I sat down in front of a google doc entitled "My Identity, Who is Tavia?" and I typed pages of things that all these diseases could never take from me no matter how hard they tried.
Who am I? I'm the kind of girl that mixes sun dresses with leather jackets and too tall high heels.
I'm the only person in my entire class at culinary school with enough spine to stick my bare hand in a pot of 300 degree F boiling sugar to test if it was at a hard crack yet.
And I'm the nicest person you'll meet but the kind of girl that doesn't remember your name the first 3 months we're friends.
This went on for pages and pages. When I finished typing it up and read through it I cried and I cried. I couldn't believe it. For so long I had believed that all I was was pain. Pain and misery. Hyperacusis is misery, what we're going through is misery, but not us. We are not misery. We are ourselves. We just have to find out who we are again under all that pain. Yes there are parts of my identity that I lost, Huge parts that I may never get back! Like the piles of instruments sitting under my bed, the fact I could never see my favorite band live, or even listen to them on the radio, or the crushing pain that you know guys just aren't that into a girl that's really pretty but looks like a freak with huge earmuffs and looks like she's gonna cry all the time and jumps every time there's a loud sound. But you know, these last few weeks, I've found this peace that I haven't felt in months and it's because I found myself. Underneath all the pain, prescription medications, doctors appointments, therapy sessions, and just bull crap, I found
me.
Sit down and write out who you are. If pain is your only identity, like it was mine for so long, you're going to drown, and there's no escaping that. No matter how bad it gets, no matter how much hyperacusis takes from you, comes into your house in the night like a thief and steals your life away, you can't let it steal your identity. You can't let it steal who you are. You can't let it win
Send me a message if you need anything, I check my inbox daily, I have other correspondences that I'm keeping up on so I would love to talk to you. Oceans, I've been there. Not exactly where you've been, but I've been through hell and I've definitely seen the devil. He hasn't gone away, I've just learned to live stronger. I hope the same for you.
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