Gracie is standing in the living room, dressed in nothing but her pull-up and pop-tart crumbs, singing a slightly-off key version of a song I have never heard before.  “It’s the man and the man and the man and the sea!  It’s the man and the man and the man and the sea.”  Abbie is straddling my knee, watching her sister intently, trying her best to get out a full-belly laugh – the best she can muster is a “huh, huh, huh” but she’s smiling so brightly when she does it that you just know that her heart is laugh, laugh, laughing.  I’m sitting there watching the sisters, relishing the interaction between the two of them, glowing with happiness at the love between my girls.  At least that’s what I should be doing.  And I am, at least partially, but I’m also spending the seconds in between glowing happiness researching benign brain tumors on the internet.  Fun, fun, fun…  And for once, I’m not researching rare and scary diseases because I’ve taken one little bitty symptom that the girls or Steve or I have and inflated into the terrifying disease of the week.  Nope, this time I’m looking because a doctor actually told me that I might have one. What was he thinking?  Perhaps I should have written “internet hypochondriac” on the existing conditions line of the patient history form.  To the man’s credit, he said there was a 1 in 200 chance that it’s a benign brain tumor.  But of course, I completely tuned out the 1 in 200 part – at least I managed to hear the benign part.

I’m not sure when it started, but sometime between the time that I got married and the time that Gracie was two, I started to lose the hearing in my right ear.  It wasn’t really a big deal – I compensated by walking on the right side of people, so my left ear was closer to the conversation.  Bars and large parties were a bit difficult, but come on, I’m the mom of a very attached toddler - bars and large parties are rarities in my world.  So, for the most part, I just dealt with it and went on with my life.  When I was two months pregnant with Abbie, my hearing took a sudden turn for the worse.  My right ear started making this kind of annoying noise, but not really noise, that kind of sounds like the whir of a computer fan – in fact when I’m sitting at my computer, I don’t even notice it because it sounds so much like the computer.  And the hearing in that ear became unusable – I couldn’t even hear the dial tone on the phone on that side.  I had a horrible head cold the first two months that I was pregnant – I coughed non-stop, my sinuses felt like they were going to explode, and I remember my ear hurting.  I went to my general doctor who of course said, “sorry but you’re just going to have to deal with it since you’re pregnant.”  I asked my OB/GYN about it and he said it wasn’t uncommon to have Eustachian tube problems during pregnancy, but it was odd since it was just on one side.  Well, the cold passed, but my hearing didn’t get any better.  But, I never mentioned it again – I think I probably just adapted – or not.  And Dr. Daphne just decided that since my hearing wasn’t that great in that ear to begin with that the pregnancy was probably affecting that side more than the other.  Hmmmm, it sounded logical at the time…

Fast forward to October of 2006.  Abbie has made her surprise arrival, we’re both home from the hospital and I decide I’m going to get some medical stuff taken care of while I’m out on maternity leave.  I went to the eye doctor and found out my nearsightedness is actually better and I scheduled an appointment with my general doctor to see if there’s something they can do about my hearing.  I’m suspecting at this point that I just have a bad ear and a hearing aid will be in my future.  That doesn’t bother me at all – I think I’m way past the point where I have any vanity worries –  in October, I was barely one month post-partum.  I was lucky to be taking a shower every day and my biggest concern was that if I slept on the wrong side, I couldn’t hear Abbie cry out in the night.  So, I make my appointment and the doctor confirms what I know – I have a hearing loss in my right ear.  He gives me a referral to an ENT and tells me to go to the hearing aid shop in the front of our Walmart and get a hearing test done before my ENT appointment so they’ll have something to go on.  So, I do that and the hearing test confirms what I know – that I have a pretty severe unilateral hearing loss.  The audiologist says that by law she can’t sell me a hearing aid with that great of discrepancy between my ears, so it’s a good thing I already have an appointment with the ENT.  In November, I go to see the ENT.  He meets with me for about a nanosecond, takes a look at copy of my audiogram exam and tells me that it looks like unilateral otosclerosis, a hearing loss that some people theorize can be exacerbated by pregnancy.  I’m cool with that diagnosis – surgery is an option to treat it, but not a requirement – a hearing aid is a perfectly acceptable way to treat it.  And at this point, less than two months after Abbie’s arrival and my scary c-section, I’m in NO hurry to have any surgeries.  The doctor tells me to come back in three weeks and I’ll have a more in depth hearing test to confirm the suspected diagnosis and then if that test shows the same thing, we’ll talk about surgery or a hearing aid.

My follow-up appointment was originally scheduled for the first part of December, but I rescheduled twice because of Christmas parties and a conference once I got back to work.  When I actually went to the appointment on January 30^th, I wasn’t worried – I mean surely the test would show the same thing, right?  Wrong.  After I finished the hearing test, which I knew I did miserably on, I met with the doctor.  He said, “I don’t think you have otosclerosis.  Your hearing test indicates nerve damage and in about 1 out of 200 cases, this loss is caused by a brain tumor.  These are benign but they have to be taken care of. You’ll need an MRI of your brain to rule it out.”  Ummm, hello, doctor, don’t you realize I don’t have time for this?  I’ve got a job, a husband, a preschooler and a nursing baby to worry about…And of course, I ask the question that I ask about everything now – “Could high blood pressure have caused it?”  Because, in my mind, pre-eclampsia is the cause of everything that’s wrong with me – if it can make a baby come five weeks early, and cause a placenta to separate from the uterus, surely it can wreak havoc on something as small as a hearing nerve.  No dice.  The doctor shakes his head and says, “No – not likely.” 

So, I manage to keep it together until I get out to the car and then I break into sobs.  All I can think about is that something is wrong with me that might keep me from being the mama that I want to be to my girls.  That I won’t be able to run and play with them the way I want, or even worse, I won’t be there at all.  That someone else might get the honor of raising my children.  Okay, I admit I was overreacting, but I’m trying to be honest.

Now that I’ve had a few days to mull it over (and search and search and re-search on every available website, forum, bulletin board, and medical journal), I’m still pretty freaked out and I’m still worried about what it could mean for my girls, but I’m pretty confident that I’ll still be around to see them grow up.  And I’m still trying to remind myself that 1 in 200 means that there’s a 99.95 percent chance that there’s not a tumor in my brain.  Now, I’ve just got to get through the MRI.  In the meantime, I’m going to spend more time enjoying my girls and less time worrying – okay, at least I’m going to try…