And a beginning

I was a little kid, with ear problems and a stutter. Now looking back, I’m sure it was cute to adults, the cute little kid who wore a bathing cap at the pool and stammered while speaking. But at the time it was just embarrassing.

The problems with my ears first started in Mrs. Fajardo’s class, my first grade teacher. While we were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the day, my left ear started hurting more than I’d ever felt before. It was like someone was trying to shove a rolling pin through my ear from the inside. I ran up to her, holding my ear, grimacing in pain and asked to be excused. But she wouldn’t let me go until we finished the Pledge, she said.

Mrs. Fajardo was a sadist that way. She had this sense of continual outrage at the antics of us, the first graders, forever losing her cool trying to keep us in order, in line and well behaved. I remember her eyes, glaring at me during this and other times I was making her life miserable. I went back to my position in class, standing with my right hand cupping my left ear, my left hand on my breast and tears rolling down my cheeks saying my pathetic teary version of the Pledge. From then on, I just could never disassociate the Pledge from my bursting ear and the stern look of Mrs. Fajardo.

Do they even make kids do the Pledge anymore? Anyway, once the Pledge was done and I was still jumping up and down in pain, Mrs. Fajardo let me go. I sped off, out the door and down the white cinder block hall, past finger paintings tacked to the wall and up the stairs to the administrative offices of Wampus elementary school, to where the nurse was.

I made it to her office, screaming frantically as the pain in my head continued unabated. The nurse put me in what passed for a sick ward in elementary school: a blue painted cinder block jail cell and a bed with pee-proof sheets.

Looking back, I have fantastic memories of me bouncing off the walls, literally. Screaming out in pain with a frantic nurse who didn’t know what to do for me, except call my mom.

When my mom finally arrived, I experienced that sense of deep relief only a child can feel when mom comes to save you. But I was still in pain and the car ride home was hellish. I rolled around in the right hand seat, clutching my ear and my mom tryied to get us home as quickly as possible. She had called her mother Helen, my grandmother, who met us at the house and sat next to me while I lay down on our couch, in the den part of our large 1950s-era kitchen/den. In one of the greatest memories I have of my grandmother, she sat by me and massaged my ear, the only thing that made it feel better, until I fell asleep.

When I finally woke up, the pain was gone. My eardrum had punctured, tearing a hole and relieving the pressure.

This was the beginning of my going to see Dr. Lawrence, the ear, nose and throat specialist whose office was inside a sleek black glass box of a building, and whose face and soft voice were like Wilt Chamberlain’s. I learned from him that my Eustachian tubes, the passages that connect the nose and sinuses to the ear canals had gotten blocked up with fluid (what I perceive now to be a more polite word for snot). The build up had caused the pressure that had made me desecrate the Pledge and scream all the way to the nurse’s office.

At Dr. Lawrence’s office, he showed me illustrations of the ear, pointing to where the eardrum was, the small bones inside the inner ear that allowed you to hear and the Eustachian tubes, where he explained how mine were doing an abysmal job of draining and how they were going to do surgery to implant little tubes in there to relieve the pressure.

His office was incredibly modern, with red wraparound sofas in the waiting room and magazine for adults, so different from the kid wrecked pediatrician’s office with toys and kids books that I usually went to. Within each examining room, a dentists-like chair was centered and modern art posters hung on the minimalist white walls. Whenever I would visit, I would take a hearing test in a windowed isolation closet of sorts, where I’d open the door, and step inside to sudden, miraculous silence. I put on the giant puddy plastic ear phones and then the nurse would turn knobs outside and I’d hear the alternating high and low pitched tones and lift my left or right hand depending on what side the tone was coming from to prove I wasn’t deaf.

I underwent five or six surgeries over several years, where Dr. Lawrence implanted the small tubes. They had to be replaced over and over because my ear would heal up and the tubes would fall out. Once I remember finding one on my pillow, it looked like a little piece of macaroni.

Because of the tubes, and the resulting hole in my ear I couldn’t swim without earplugs and a bathing cap or I might have lost my hearing. So I was a total dork whenever I had to swim. I didn’t get the cool Speedo caps, instead I had to wear my mom’s floppy “mermaid caught in a kelp forest” ones or cheap kids versions that looked like cut in half kickballs. It was horrible and led to a childhood of hating the water.

I remember the operations clearly, getting prepped for surgery (meaning suppositories up your bum), receiving special foam hospital slippers in a bag from the nurses, waking up after the operation and vomiting and the extra large McDonald’s cokes that my dad brought me, and which I never had at any other times, when I couldn’t eat solid foods the night before.

The worst part was the sleeping gas, which I guess was nitrous. I can still smell it, like melted Styrofoam or the smell when you bend a piece of plastic. In the operating room, having to put on that rubber mask, the feeling of not being able to breath and then the smell of the nitrous terrified me. I remember one of the last operations, trying to get it over as fast as possible and go right to sleep. I started hyperventilating and the anesthesiologist had to stop me and tell me to calm down and to breath slower.

Dreams under the gas were unusually vivid. I remember one of them still, me floating in my parent’s kitchen as if I were a ghost. I was hovering near the ceiling on the most perfect summer day imaginable. My parent’s house is a classic 1950s style ranch home, with no attic so the ceiling is angled just like the roof. I was floating at the very top point. The sun’s rays were pouring through the window in front of the sink and through the other windows. It was incredibly peaceful and felt absolutely real. I’ve had only a few other dreams in my life so vivid.

But beyond just the ears, the bathing caps and the constant fear that I’d get thrown in a pool by a bully and become deaf, I also stuttered and sometimes still do. Although at this point, most people don’t even know it.

It was especially bad when I was in elementary to middle school. I was teased and went to a therapist named Dr. Whortley for treatment. He was a kind little man who met me in his house, where he tried to make me feel less anxious, which was one of the major reasons I stuttered, in addition to the fact that I spoke so quickly that I couldn’t get it all out of my mouth and clammed up.

He helped me work through those root causes and then also tried to just slow me down, to learn to stop and breath if I had a stammer, to not let it get to me or freeze up so that I couldn’t start speaking again. He also helped me wrestle with and get rid of the array of physical ticks that I had developed to try to re-boot my brain when I hit a block. After hitting some word or sound that was difficult for me to pronounce, I often would almost unconsciously touch my nose or tap my elbow or even slap my face, whatever it took to unclench.

Many people who have a minor stutter lose it totally or greatly reduce their stammer once they grow up. I’ve learned that scientists think it may have something to do with brain development, as you get older whatever was causing the problem gets resolved. At this point my stuttering comes out only in very specific situations or with a particular phonic, such as a hard consonant after a vowel like the contraction, “can’t.”

Or for example the number 8, it’s a terror for me. I’m afraid of 8s. There’s something about that number, that 8, that’s hard to say. It’s the hard ay sound that catches in my throat and makes me want to twitch even now. My work number is 312-224-8188. So I’m constantly coming up with new ways to tell it to people to prevent stuttering. 8-1-8-8. 8-1 and eighty eight. Eight one and two eights or I’ve even tried “3-1-2-2-2-4 and forgive me I sometimes get caught up when I say 8, 8-1-8-8.

By the time I’m done I feel like some freaking autistic with a number fetish. But other numbers are no problem. Some people are arachnophobes, they can’t stand one spider crawling around the shower but have no problem with swarming house flies. I’m like that with eight. Give me a six and it’s like heaven, silky, smooth and easy to pronounce.

There are other things, such as reading a story or a script out loud that I know will cause me to stutter even today, but I couldn’t tell you why. I’ve tried to understand, but I haven’t been able to come up with much besides the idea that I fear that having a script means I’ve got to speak perfectly, without errors or stammers and that causes anxiety, which causes me to stutter.

There have been real world ramifications to my stuttering, I stopped pursuing a career in public radio due to my inability, and what I guess is a phobia, to read from a script even though I’ve been told I have a good radio voice. And yet, the hilarious thing about all this is that I love to read out loud. When I do and am speaking without pause, I feel on top of the world and liberated. It’s like I’m breathing fresh air after years of sitting in a coal mine.