Wednesday I was catching up on a message thread in a list in which I'm a member and someone commented on the level of fear seemingly present around the world.

I then received an e-m from one of my brothers who made the same comment.

That evening I decided to write about the fear I am experiencing.

Note that I wrote parts of this Wednesday evening and during the day Thursday so it reflects a range of emotional states I was in.

I first will need to provide some context...

One evening in September 1995 (unbeknowst to me at the time) within a span of minutes I experienced aural and vestibulary nerve damage which resulted in effectively 100% hearing loss in my right ear as well as elimination of vestibular function used to maintain balance, likely from a virus. Included in the deal is a persistent and ever present tinnitus.

One Sunday morning in August 2002 in conjunction with a cold I experienced partial hearing loss / distortion and tinnitus in my left ear. I was told it was congestion due to the cold leading to fluid in the middle ear and was assured my hearing would be ok. I may have gotten a prescription for a decongestant and possibly an antibiotic. I was tested early the following week and did show some hearing loss, however as time passed the tinnitus faded and my perception that my hearing ability via the left ear was diminished faded as well. While I never had myself retested I'm open to the possibility that as my upper respiratory situation improved the hearing loss diminished as well. This speculation is grounded in the experiences of a colleague who apparently goes through this several times a year. Ok, so apparently there's temporary hearing loss / vestibular dysfunction and then there's the permanent kind. So I've experienced both.

The last five months or so have been pretty challenging in the 'internal jihad' sense. (I could be flip and say that apparently my Big I decided this summer was as good a time as any for some serious interior re-factoring yet I think this was actually a direct result of a specific intention I set for myself back in February...) Among the many effects of this struggle was about five weeks ago, the Saturday before Lehman folded (I don't think the timing was coincidence), I had an experience where I felt a shift in one of my emotional worldviews - a shift to an abundance worldview. For me this is profound - pondering it since I feel that if I was given one the opportunity to ask and receive one thing it would be to live in a state of knowing that no matter what things looked like on the outside I would be ok.

The next day I learned of Lehman's impending collapse and that set in course the current round of Fear and Loathing on Wall Street we've been experiencing the last five plus weeks. And while all this is going on I had the sense that while keeping alert was advisable no matter what happened I would be ok.

So a couple of weeks after that I begin experiencing what I thought was allergies - a lot of nasal congestion. After a couple of days of this I'm thinking that while this is annoying and energy draining, compared to observing the experiences of other people who seem to have more challenging upper respiratory problems I consider myself relatively lucky to be in such good shape.

So I wake up Sunday morning with fluid in my left (the 'good' ear). Other than the distraction of hearing my voice 'inside my head' I seem to hear ok so I'm thinking this is just a congested eustachian tube and considering the last three weeks probably to be expected. I had previously used EFT to clear some shortness of breath so I figured I could clear the fluid and continue my day. No dice. I tried another tool in my toolbox which I've previously used to clear congestion in my head, that didn't work either.

By Monday I consider that while this is annoying perhaps for reasons which are not known to me my body has its own reasons for not clearing. I'm willing to consider the possibility that perhaps during this period of experiencing <allergy / cold / WTF this is> I've picked up a nasty nerve eating virus to which my body has wisely decided the appropriate response is to seal the entrance to my remaining good ear. So, rather than force it (i.e. run out to the allopathic Dr for some Big Pharma product) I'll flow with it.

Monday evening I did experience a small wave of anxiety - I had a very strong need to call my friend J who recently moved to Portland and hear her voice because OMG what if I am experiencing slow hearing loss and I'll never hear her voice again.

Tuesday night I decided that if it hadn't cleared by Wednesday I would see my allopathic Dr to at least be diagnosed. J had pointed out that while this could simply be due to congestion it could also be due to infection in which case I would want to be treated with the Big Guns [1].

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[1] I think Dr. Andrew Weill in one of his books describes a very good heuristic for determining if one should seek allopathic (e.g. 'Western') care or alternative modalities first. If it's chronic (e.g. hypertension) try the alternatives first, else if it's acute (e.g. heart attack) then you're going to want to pull out the Big Guns to save your posterior.

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It was when I was trying to fall asleep that I noticed I could hear what my dad calls 'the sounds of silence' in my left ear i.e. tinnitus (I describe it as having a nest of metallic wasps in my ear so apparently the poet gene skips a generation...)

Uh oh. Monday night I was slightly anxious. Now I can sense Fear out in the dark sending out a couple of tendrils into my perception:

"Hey Buddy long time no talk. Where've you been? Hey I was just wondering, have you considered the possibility that this is real and permanent hearing loss? What if it doesn't stop and you become effectively deaf?"

Somehow I managed to get to sleep.

Wednesday I notice that it's a noticeable harder than the previous days to hear my co-workers so I make an appt with my Dr. When I pick up my kids after school it hits me - I'm having a really hard time understanding them - when they're in the car with me I can hear them but I can't understand what they're saying.

"Hi Brendan, it's me, Fear. I'm baaaccccckkkkk." I explain to the children what's happening and admit that I'm scared. Somehow I hold it together while we go about winding up our day.

In The Art of Happiness the Dalai Lama writes that one common reason for dissatisfaction is we 'compare up' (i.e. keeping up w/the Joneses i.e. thinking our neighbor has the better car, house, spouse, kids, etc.). Instead if we'd 'compare down' we'd realize how good we have it and feel better about our lives. And he's right - after briefly (it was hard to hear even with the headset) talking with a friend Wednesday she felt much better. :-) (Yes, this is dark humor).

As an INTJ I know I have a strong bias in my personality towards isolation. One of the consequences of the hearing loss thirteen years ago is that it takes a lot more effort to avoid isolating myself. This is for a variety of reasons: with more than one person it's harder for me to track conversations (no ability to determine who's speaking via binaural hearing means I have to scan my environment); heightened ambient noise levels both make it hard for me to understand what someone is saying as well as requiring more effort (energy) to participate in a conversation, this tends to rule out Happy Hours, company parties, etc. as activities which I seek out).

This is by way of explaining that one of the things I've been happy about the last several months is that I've been making an effort to reach out to my colleagues (both within my team as well as elsewhere in the company) so when I began to perceive the difficulties of really having holding a normal conversation, understanding my children in the car, understanding someone on the phone - I begin to get a glimpse into how isolating effective deafness in both ears could be.

It's about this time that I starting wondering if the wheels are going to fly off my mental wagon. We're talking Stephen King, claw your way through concrete if you have to to get away from The Monster, Fear.

After a while that subsides and I shift into what I call my Why Me? Why This? Why Now? mode which fortunately didn't last too long.

After the kids were in bed I was able to think back to the experience five weeks ago and realized something. I walked through the financial credit crisis knowing I'd be ok. There're other things in the last several weeks I haven't mentioned and I've walked through them knowing I'd be ok.

This is a different story - this has knocked me off my center. It would be an understatement to say I'm trying to find it again.

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So I see my Dr Thu morning (or more accurately my Dr's Nurse Practitioner). She's great - we really clicked. I could relate my past history to her and she got that I knew what I was talking about when it came to being self-aware of my body and how to care for it. This meant we could bypass the "Let me treat you like a passive object who I'll treat based on standard diagnostic and statistical principles which would result in you getting less effective care than what you need" experience and move directly to "I'm taking you seriously and we're going to develop an aggressive treatment plan because what we have here is a serious situation" experience (yes, I had negative experiences with Doctors during the first two hearing loss experiences).

She examines my right ear and noted it had some fluid but was not infected. I know something is up when she's checking the left and goes "Hmmm" and proceeds to dig around in there for quite a while. She leaves and comes back with a textbook (!) to show me what's going on (like I said I like her). Apparently a couple of things are anomalous. One is that my ear drum is pressed in, not out i.e. I have negative pressure in my ear drum. This is actually causing the ear drum to press against the inner ear bones and is why a lot of external sounds are muffled. Presumably higher frequencies are more affected which is why it's more hard for me to hear women and children. The second thing was some well, crap (for want of a better term) (she thinks it likely it's some mucus which worked its way into the middle ear), floating around in there. She didn't think it was infected and wasn't Cholesteatoma (if it was she'd send me to the ER for treatment, Cholesteatoma is a middle ear problem which could result in deafness and according to the Wikipedia entry even worse). So I learned of a new way one's hearing can be destroyed by something you need the use of a microscope to see. I begin to question who's at the top of what food chain...

The final diagnosis is something like sinus infection with complications. I'm on antibiotics to clear the infection, nasal decongestant to start clearing the sinii, "real" Sudafed [2] to clear sinii as well and Mucinex to thin the mucus.

The hope is that this will be the physical equivalent of a $700 Billion bailout to get my sinii / eustachian tube / ear circulatory system unfrozen and moving again.

Near the end of our visit she told me (really) "I would have loved to have you as a patient during my ENT training." (And no this was not in reference to my animal magnetism :-) ). Jeez, I like feeling special but this is ridiculous.

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[2] Ok, this is important - their is a difference between Pseudoephedrine and Phenylephrine.

Pseudoephedrine is what you used to be able to buy OTC until the Feds / State decided to make you sign for it in an effort to shut down crystal meth labs. To no surprise this has been unsuccessfully and led to a host of unintended consequences, one of them being that in ignorance people like me and my daughter who experience seasonal allergies cannot buy an OTC product which would provide relief and possibly avoid situations like I am currently in. What I mean by this is that until I started researching I did not know that Phenylephrine, the 'substitute' for OTC decongestants previously containing Pseudoephedrine, is thought to be no better than a placebo. This was confirmed by both my daughter's pediatrician and my Dr's Nurse Practitioner. Thus a consumer walks up to a shelf and in ignorance selects a decongestant product which effectiveness relies on their belief in its effectiveness rather than buying what appears to be a more 'real' i.e. product which is effective independent of the user's belief.

So what you need to know is this - next time you need to buy a OTC decongestant do not buy any OTC product which is on the shelf containing Phenylephrine - it will not contain what you need. Instead go to the counter and ask for products containing 'real' decongestant i.e. Pseudoephedrine. You will need to show your ID and sign for it but provided you aren't in fact trying to stock a meth lab by buying in bulk you won't have any problems buying it. FWIW it does have the side-effect of wiring you so you probably don't want to take it before bed...

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Thursday evening I saw my friend M who did some extensive energy work on me. I won't go into detail of what she came back with (it's even more personal that what's here) but will note a couple of things.

The first is I noticed that I started to clear while with her - I could definitely tell I could hear her better when I left than we I first arrived. I also noticed later in the evening that I could talk on the phone with one of my friends with more clarity than before.

She also helped me re-frame my experiences within the context of the Work I've been doing. From her perspective (which I generally share) what we're all working on right now is facing Fear (and as is apparent there're many opportunities around us to face Fear) and clearly this is a humdinger (as I've summarized this sounds flip and uncompassionate; fortunately that's simply how I've summarized it as she's one of the most compassionate people I've met).

So where I'm at now is more calm than I've been in the last 24 hours. Compared to Wednesday and most of today I'm feeling better (about where I was before Wednesday) and at the same time I don't think I'm out of the woods yet.

Bottom line is anyone who wants to send me light / love / healing energy / prayer - feel free to lay it on me.

Namaste.