Searching for Silence

This year, Thanksgiving was a benchmark, a goal, a time for evaluating Melissa’s health. And while I have, on occasion, asked for the prayers of family and friends, I have never actually explained what happened, not to anyone other than close family and a few people who saw one or both of us fall apart. So if you’ll indulge me this holiday, for a few minutes, here is the story of an unusual condition, one we are now thankful appears to be close to an exit.

Early last April, Melissa complained of a sound in her ears, a sound that was screaming at the pace of her pulse, with every beat of her heart, a sound that never let up, not once, 24/7, keeping her up at night, making it hard to even have conversations that weren’t drowned out by something louder, something she couldn’t shake. To really understand the impact of a sound like this, you have to know that my wife is a musician, a former violinist, a quiet woman who never basks in the public eye or begs for attention, but who adores the silence between measures of beautiful notes. She has always been enormously patient and remarkably peaceful, but this sound cut into her like a knife, carving up her normally calm and collected mind, just days after we had made our plans for summer, a long awaited trip to Switzerland and Austria.

For several consecutive weeks, we visited ENTs, neurologists, chiropractic specialists, and dentists, all of whom veered us toward an MRI, MRA, MRV, an Ultra Sound, and a spinal tap. There was even a scare, on one of my last days of the last school year, when she was called in, early in the morning, with an urgent need for further testing. They had seen something and wanted a closer look. I remember falling apart in the parking lot of the school, alternating between sitting inside my car and leaning beside it, worrying about every worst case scenario. And then, nothing. Two months, lots of doctors, lots of tests, but no diagnosis. Except for this nagging, 24 hour-a-day sound, and then some fluid build up, along with incessant popping in her ears, a series of ailments that kept getting worse, not better, a condition we finally had to diagnose ourselves, something known as Pulsatile Tinnitus, something most people said was incurable.

Understandably, as the problems escalated, we cancelled our trip to Europe and focused on staying close to home, not daring to test a change of altitude on her ears. On the day we had planned to be wandering through the Swiss Alps, we were sitting in a hospital, awaiting a lumbar puncture, something to test whether the pressure in her brain was causing all of these pulsing, screaming, scratching sounds. And so the summer went, doctor visit after doctor visit, coupled with a growing sense, for Melissa, of hopelessness, a state of mind I completely understood and empathized, but a level of depression I had never seen in anyone, let alone my wife, a point at which she barely wanted to move or get out of bed to do anything. For one brief week, we tried to visit the Florida Keys, but had to come back early, on her birthday even, because the sound and the fluid and the popping kept getting worse. As you can imagine, every movement, every action, every mundane activity led to an increasing heart rate. So she stayed still, and stared, struggling to get up for work, for weeks more on end, just as I was starting a new job and, for the first time, felt the worst kind of agony about leaving her at home, alone.

In late July, we found a TMJ specialist, and an X-Ray, an image and a man that showed us how, unlike a normal jaw with cartilage and smooth, easy movement in the opening joints, Melissa’s jaw had completely worn down, becoming bone on bone, rubbing and scratching, and likely, causing a great deal of the problem. This was the first time in four months that anyone had actually seen something concrete, the first time someone had said, “I know what’s wrong and I can help. I want to help.” This was also the first time we cried together in a doctor’s office. But he reminded us of the long haul ahead, that restoration of that cartilage would likely take months.

During the worst of the summer, I started asking Melissa to give me numbers on a range, to tell me where, on a scale of 1 to 10 she was at, to give me a better sense of what she was experiencing at various times of the day, since this was not a sound that ever fully went away. To put this all in perspective, back in early April, it had been an 8-9. In the summer, after many tests and some therapy, it still hovered in the 5-6 range. But as we began to focus on healing the jaw, and the bone, and a few dozen muscles at the base of her head, the sound slowly dipped, down to a 4, then a 3, and a 2 and sometimes, but rarely a 1.

At some point in October, I asked if she wanted to try a test flight, to travel somewhere and see how her ears would manage, to see if they could sustain these lower numbers, being pushed in ways they had not been pushed for months. Originally, I pitched the idea of going to Iceland, but she wanted to stay stateside, just in case. So we agreed on Massachusetts, to go far, but not too far.

Fast forward to this week, and the last few days. Setting aside a long, unexpected hike through the heavy sands of Chappaquiddick, when her sound briefly reached a 5, I would say this is the happiest I have seen my wife all year. Maybe the happiest I’ve seen her, over several days, in two or three years. And that makes me incredibly happy, and thankful.

It’s hard to overstate the value of silence, the difficulty of being in a quiet room and still hearing sounds, uncomfortable, pulsing, scratching sounds. My wife hasn’t had any true silence for months. But we’re getting there. We took a few long walks, on Martha’s Vineyard and last night in Boston, and she’s doing well, in search of that silence.

We all need a quiet place, even within ourselves. So if you get a chance to be alone, to stand or sit in a room with no one around, to listen to the sound of nothing, to relish in the quiet, even for a few moments, please be thankful. Silence is a treasure.