The Ear Saga Continues, as Does the Heart Saga in 2020

One thing about a lingering health problem that I observe–one has an opportunity to learn more about one’s own body. So intricate!

Much better check up report on Wednesday and then even though the fungal infection was clearing the doctor found a small hole in my ear drum. That is new.

Lots of questions after that from her to me about how much hearing I was experiencing in that ear, my right ear. How would I know? I had a hearing aid in my left ear…and my right ear had lost 60 per cent of hearing before this problem started.

I can note if there is no hearing, apparently. It was like that when I sought care. But some hearing is not possible to detect now and I cannot put a hearing aid in yet to see if overall hearing is boosted. Still too messy in that ear. She wants to see me every three working days…I looked up perforated ear drum and found info. Small holes usually heal on their own, I read. But larger holes can affect hearing, block hearing or can change what you hear–in that they can change the sounds of the words or voices or the noise of life as it continues unfolding.

I remind me that I usually sneak through such things and they end well. I go back on Monday. I have no idea how to find the office she will be in on Monday, not the same two that are nearby for sure. My daughter will assist by driving me to that office that’s at least 40 minutes away.

So concerned about my grandson who is a carpenter and work is simply closing up. Day after day, not jobs. Bills mounting. He’s coming over this afternoon and bringing his bills. Maybe I can help a bit…pay with my check some of the mounting debt. I have donated to his cousins’ college fees and first car purchases a few thousand dollars so can without showing preference do the same for him. He’s more a throw back to our generations past relatives…a cowboy, a rapper sort of wanta-be tough
guy. Nothing like my or Kermit’s generation and our offspring.

I am careful not to enable him…thus my checks in envelopes that I mail. He’s loved and believed in by his grandmother, in that I expect him to do well in the next decade. After he sees – as I mused he is beginning to – that senseless rebellion is not paying off. The depression that is coming, and I think it is close upon us, I believe will bring us all to our knees. Maybe we will rise wiser and more cautious people.

Best of all…I expect his three daughters, my only greatsies, to accompany him. We were so close in the past, and I was at the births of two of them. Then he and their mom separated. It’s been three years since I saw them last…and they were living only 15 minutes away from me when with their dad. I saw their pictures on FB regularity and kept in touch with him and their mom, still do, who share the girls weekly.

No I didn’t go to either of them them, uninvited. No reason to toss my loss into their already complicated lives. There has been in each of the parents, who were pregnant as teenagers who scarcely knew each other at the time of their first pregnancy, a sense of them not measuring up to others of their generation in our family, that I understood. I continued to invite them here…and bode my time.

My goal as an elder is not to burden my family with my needs. Life is complicated enough.

Maybe it will be today. I have all the unclaimed holiday gifts on the bed in the children’s bedroom here and am getting out the furniture for the doll house that was gathered from my doll house over the years of my grandchildren’s growing up until now…a 60 year span, I’d say. Books, art supplies.... Games. They all await.

Last updated June 05, 2020