It's ringing again! Tinnitus.

I haven't spoken about my tinnitus in a while. Mostly because I don't experience it much anymore. However I notice that when I am very tired or stressed it comes back. It's like a little internal warning bell that goes off when I need to slow down.

With the end of the year fast approaching things are certainly getting stressful. I've hosted two big parties over the last two weekends, I've had one child at home sick for a week and now both kids are home for the holidays full-time, assignments due for uni, Steve's 50th birthday which seems to be an ongoing month long celebration, getting ready to take an overseas trip just after Christmas, major stress at work to try and meet financial deadlines to keep everyone's job intact and all the organisation that comes with Christmas with kids. My brain is ringing more than the Christmas bells at the moment!!

I don't have a medical condition as such, I don't need treatment, I don't take medication and I look and appear to be very healthy and "with it". Sometimes this makes it very hard to explain to people that I just need to take time off. The last three weeks I've spent whole days in bed totally exhausted. If I was actually sick, stress related or otherwise, I could claim sick leave and everyone would understand. I'm just not sure that I can get away with "hearing fatigue" leave or "tinnitus driving me crazy and sending me messages to take a break" leave. Maybe I should start a new category in sick leave :)

Annual Report Feature

Here I am featured in the Ear Science Institute Australia's Annual Report 2012. I'm the face of ESIA this year, next year it will probably be Revlon .............

Ear Science Institute Night

Last night I was invited as a guest speaker at the Ear Science Institute to talk about my experience of going deaf and having a cochlear implant. It was a wonderful night attended by many influential people in business, education and research. I met the Chief Scientist of Western Australia who took a photo of me for her Twitter page (I kid you not) and the Principal of the Deaf School of Western Australia who has invited me to come to the school and speak to the children. I was also "featured" in the Ear Science Institute Annual Report. By far the highlight of the event was when a gentleman approached me with a cut out of the newspaper article I had done some weeks ago and wanted to meet me. "It's really you", he said to me while pointing at the article. I felt like a celebrity!!! This is a photo of the gentleman, Alexander Clark, below. Lovely guy and fellow deafie.

Alexander and Jane at the Ear Science Institute Event

My Newspaper Article

I'm Flat!

While it's never happened before but today I find myself in an unusual position. All three of my rechargeable batteries are flat. That means I can't turn on my CI until they are charged which takes about four-five hours. That means today, I'm deaf.
Before I got the CI I would happily go about my day but now that I can hear with the CI I don't like to go out in public, it's just too hard. So today I'm staying home in my silent world until I'm all charged up! Hopefully I'll be charged for tonight because I'm giving a speech as the Ear Science Institute on my personal story of sudden hearing loss and the benefits of the cochlear implant. I have an audience of 100 people and of course the mingle afterwards so it would be handy to be able to hear. I will report back ...............

Fame and Fortune

The media have finally realised my star potential, check out this link:
http://www.inmycommunity.com.au/shopping-and-lifestyle/health-and-wellbeing/Gift-of-hearing-restored/7635826/

The return from Singapore

Singapore was a blast, I had so much fun. We went everywhere and did everything.
It was the first time I'd been away with friends since becoming deaf and there were a few differences I noticed. The first being the isolation between the deaf and the hearing. While it wasn't overly obvious, I still felt a little left out of things because I simply didn't know what was going on. I always had to ask the others "what's happening" just be kept in the loop. This really came to a head when five minutes before we were due to board the plane to return home, one of the girls I was travelling with announced she had lost her passport. No passport, no boarding the plane. This obviously created a huge amount of stress for all of us as we tried to come up with solutions to get home. The worst part from my point of view was that in the panic I didn't know what was going on. I guess that's how children feel most of the time when adults are making decisions for them but the adults don't stop to explain what's happening. This is a bit how I felt, like a child.

I also had a minor panic of my own when my batteries went flat and I had to change them during dinner. I use disposable batteries when I travel so I don't have to worry about recharging my normal ones. I replaced the flat batteries but when I tried to turn the processor on it didn't work. Panic, panic, panic. Thoughts kept swirling in my head that I'd have to go deaf for the rest of the trip, that I couldn't go off shopping on my own or chat with my friends or all sorts of things ........... I tried a number of different things, finally taking the batteries out and replacing them the other way around. Phew, this worked. I experienced a wave of relief. Having had the cochlear implant for a year now I simply cannot go back to being deaf again, not even for a day.

The best part of the trip? When one of my friends turned to me at the end of the long midnight flight and asked if I had got any sleep. "Yep", I said, "slept like a baby with my ear turned off, how about you?". "No", she replied, "there was a baby crying the whole way ....................".