Getting Ready for the Real World

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks either preparing for surgery, having surgery, or recovering from surgery. It’s been rough at times, but it’s proven to be an incredible learning experience.

This Saturday night, I’ll return to the “real world” for the first time when my band 3.26 will be playing a gig at a local coffee house. We do this every month, and have been for the past 7 years. We play all sorts of stuff, original tunes, a lot of Dylan, Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Springsteen, and similar tunes, plus some cover tunes that would probably be considered unexpected. It’s a good time, and we don’t take it (or ourselves) too seriously. The last time we played, I set up everything (amplifiers, etc) in the center of the stage and positioned myself to stage right so that I could hear everything clearly in my left ear. I’ll do the same thing this weekend, and probably will continue doing it like that for the forseeable future, until the cochlear implant is activated and everything is “normal” again.

Next Monday, I go back to work, and then next weekend, I head up to Boston for a conference. I’m an instructional technology professional (I’m a Blackboard administrator, if you know what that means) and I do a lot of stuff with design, development, and delivery of online courses. At this conference, I’ll be co-presenting two sessions and going to as many sessions as I can possibly squeeze in. The conference ends on March 11th, and 2 days after that, on March 13, my implant is activated.

So it’s going to be a busy couple of weeks between now and the time that my implant is activated. I’m looking forward to the challenges, but am wondering how my body is going to handle it all. Will the vertigo get worse? Will the tinnitus make it impossible for me to pay attention and learn at the conference? How am I going to physically handle the load? It’s all unknown, but I’ve got to go ahead and dive in. I’ve had enough time to recover from the surgery, and I can’t keep sitting around waiting for everything to be just exactly perfect before I go back to reality.

My healing is progressing nicely. I had a severe headache yesterday and was afraid that it could be something bad (meningitis is a real possibility after surgery), but it was just a sinus headache. I’ve gone through a lot over the past few months, and it’s real easy for me to get scared these days. It’s real easy for me to want to crawl under the covers and hide from life.

But I can’t be paranoid. I can’t be paralyzed by fear. I’ve got to face life head-on. I will heal. I will persevere. I will not give in. One day, I will be better than ever.

But that day can’t come soon enough…