Faint Music from the Next Room (Cecilia Peartree)

Something happened to me recently that gave me a terrible fright. (No, this doesn't have anything to do with Hallowe'en!)

I completely lost my hearing overnight.

I had caught a really bad cold, possibly as a divine judgement for enjoying a performance of 'The Book of Mormon' at Edinburgh Playhouse or possibly because I'd spent an afternoon playing with my grandson and some bug he had picked up at nursery had breached my defences. At first it was just a normal cold, and then I woke up three nights in a row with earache and had to sit upright in a chair for a couple of hours each time until I was comfortable enough to lie down again. After the third night of earache, I woke up and found I couldn't hear anything. Only the previous day I'd been able to hear music, and audiobooks, and the sound on television, and then suddenly I couldn't.

I couldn't even ring the doctor to ask for an appointment, so my son had to do it for me, and then he had to come with me to the appointment to make sure I understood what was going on. I don't think I had needed to have anyone with me at the doctor's since I was about ten years old, although it did remind me of the time a few years ago when I went into hospital to have my hip replaced and both sons and daughter-in-law insisted on accompanying me on the morning of the operation. On that occasion it was only when one of my sons started to feel ill because we'd come out early and he hadn't had time for breakfast that I could persuade them to leave. I half-expected them all to be sitting in a row by the bed when I came out of the operating theatre.

My worst moment in recent days was after one course of antibiotics and having my ears vacuumed, when I had expected my hearing to return with a sudden pop.  But at that stage I could only hear that people were talking but not what they were saying, and music didn't sound like music any more. 

Except inside my head. 

 

I think my family thought I was losing the plot when I said to them I could hear the Ode to Joy from the final movement of Beethoven's 9th in my head. This was actually quite pleasant and reassuring in a weird way. The sound was at about the volume of someone playing it a bit too loudly but in a different room. Other favourite tunes seem to be the folk song, Shoals of Herring, which I had been listening to recently on my Kindle Fire, also The First Noel and Abide with Me, which I certainly hadn't been listening to. Later additions were part of Finlandia and the hymn that my old school had for some reason adopted as its own, Sing My Tongue How Glorious Battle Glorious Victory Became.

After several days of wondering if I had indeed lost the plot as well as my hearing, I resorted to Google, and found there's a thing called 'musical tinnitus' which is usually harmless enough. Sometimes if it gets a bit too loud when I'm trying to go to sleep, it's a little annoying, but generally I don't mind it too much.

Anyway, I believe my hearing is coming back properly at the time of writing, following a second course of antibiotics. So far, so good. I might even recover fully in time for NaNoWriMo in November.

Fortunately I had already almost completed the 25th novel in my long-running mystery series by the time all the above took place, so I just ploughed on, undistracted by any sound from outside, and published it during October.