Just Nicky

You know it was a good weekend when Emmylou is still tired at 10am the next day February 27, 2006

Thank you to Dr Bean for another lovely weekend at your little piece of paradise. It was just as beautiful as I remembered it and those paddocks are in perfect shape for dogs and kids to charge around. Your neighbour and his cows are to be congratulated. The dogs are, indeed, still tired. Em would jump at the chance of walk if I offered it, but that would be true if she was at death’s door. The fact that she can’t sit still without her eyes closing is a better indication of her state. Indi is much the same.

I have to apologise to all for piking and going to bed at the first opportunity on Saturday night. The combination of only one ear working and my tinnitus make it difficult to understand people when things get noisy (and you’re all pretty noisy) and the effort involved in making sense of what people are saying makes my head hurt. The silence of the Icon’s room with a sleeping Foozle was way too seductive.

I’ve abandoned all pretence of working today and have SMSed in sick. I’m going to the doctor in an hour or so to get a certificate to back that up. Even if there was stuff to do, I couldn’t have faced the office today. Once the mail has arrived, and my redundancy letter has not been delivered, I’ll be drafting an email to my boss and the GM, requesting confirmation of my finish date and/or tasks required to be completed before I go. I’m not sure that that will get any action or speed things up, but it’s the only thing I can do and it will make me feel better because of that.

While I’m at the doctor’s I’m going to ask her to have a look at my left ear. It feels ‘wrong’ and I’m pretty sure my tinnitus is generally louder at the moment than it usually is. I’m hoping there’s fluid in the ear - which should make no difference since the nerve is supposedly dead - but it would explain the way my ear feels and stop me imagining a new tumour.

Fluid in the ear shouldn’t affect my tinnitus, since the nerve is dead and supposedly no signal is travelling through to my brain from there. Then again, background noise shouldn’t affect my tinnitus, but it does and my surgeon said the same is true for many people in my situation. It’s one of the many unknowns about having tinnitus. Because it’s really about how the brain interprets what it receives, rather than being a purely physical phenomenon, all sorts of things about the way it behaves are not readily explainable.