Making it better

I had to go for an MRI scan some weeks ago now. I still haven’t been told the result. This is somewhat worrying given that there was a chance that I had a brain tumour, hence the scan. I still haven’t been told I haven’t got one.

What I have been told instead is that on March 2nd I have an appointment at the Ear, Nose & Throat clinic, which seems to indicate something on a different level of panic and discomfiture.

I’ve had a ringing in one ear for about a year now, after a batch of students who coughed so loud I had to actually stop a lesson gave me a massive cold. I had to have my ears syringed because I couldn’t hear anything and I didn’t think my hearing improved much afterwards, although I could hear a warning tone in the car when the soft top wasn’t latched that I’d thought had stopped working. And that, my doctor thought, could have been the problem. Not the soft top on my car, but the fact the ringing was only in one ear, not both.

Going to an ENT clinic isn’t quite in the same league as gamely battling the effects of a foreign body the size of a grapefruit inside my cranium, so hopefully no gaily-coloured headscarves to hide the baldness after the chemotherapy, no brave smiling and none of that strange unearthly beauty the dying seem so often to have. Or it could of course be that it’s just the ones with a strange unearthly beauty that get photographed.

Either way, unless the ENT clinic is just to give me better hearing in my last few weeks on earth, odds are that I don’t in fact have a brain tumour, despite the loudness of the ringing in my left ear this morning. I think it could have been done a better way though.

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Carl Bennett

Not born in a cross-fire hurricane because there is no such thing. Actually Stratford on Avon general hospital, since when Dorset, Wiltshire, compulsory London and currently Suffolk.

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