FOWC with Fandango — Compound With and Without Interest

My life has been compounded recently. I knew that with Garry’s surgery coming up, it was going to get complicated. Recently some of my own issues have been popping up — the fibromyalgia which doesn’t bother me often. When it does, it’s usually a day or two of downtime. After that, I’m good again.

But it hit me hard at the beginning of this week. I could not afford any downtime.  Too much to do and it had to get done. If I didn’t stay alert and on target, life was going to fly out of control.

I did not realize exactly how crazy it could get.

Last night, I crawled into bed. Looking forward to listening to my audiobook for a while, then drifting off. Garry was doing his best to watch a movie with the headphone more or less catty-corner over the bandaged ear, but more or less on the “good” ear.

Garry was not a happy camper. His headache just kept getting worse. Nothing he had taken was doing much to help it and we were both getting a feeling that the cup over his ear and the strap around his head were actually causing the pain. I can’t tell you how many times the bandages have caused more pain to me than the surgery under it. I thought that might be Garry’s problem too.

That and being really stoned. I was trying to figure out what to call his state of mind and suddenly, it blazed forth. He was “one toke over the line.” Maybe considerably more than one toke. Quite possibly going to stay that way for a while to come.

I did what I could to loosen the bandage, settled in and turned on my book. I turned on the speaker first, which I always do, and noticed it had gone “searching.” It does not typically do that. After a few minutes, it settled down was ready to play.

Garry could smile at Duke, even today when he was not his usual smiley self.

I turned on the book and curled up. That’s when Garry said, “I can hear your audiobook.”

“You mean … you can hear the narrator? Can you hear the actual words?”

“Yes, and it’s kind of confusing because I’m also watching a movie.”

If anyone could work with two different sounds in each ear, Garry who spent years with a hearing aid in one ear and an IFB communicator in the other would be the one.

And the Duke …

That is not supposed to happen. I went online to see if I could find anything that talked about hearing Bluetooth through a cochlear implant without external hardware. And, lo and behold, it turns out that Apple was creating exactly that so cochlear implant owners would be able to hear their iPhones without extra equipment.

We don’t have an iPhone. What he was hearing was my little Anker Bluetooth speaker which I bought maybe six months ago. But there was no arguing with the event: he definitely could hear the speaker and when I turned the speaker up, he could hear it better.

I figure the tiny coil they inserted in Garry’s right ear is essentially a manmade replacement for the coil that we are born with. I suppose there’s no reason why it can’t, given the right frequency, work as if it were Garry’s own inner-ear coil.

This is NOT something anyone warned us about and I’m not even sure anyone else has experienced it. I know that it’s theoretically possible, but it presupposes you have Bluetooth software from Apple — which I don’t. Maybe Anker bought their software from Apple or maybe they came to the same discovery on their own.

It’s not like I can look at the Anker manual. First off, there was no manual and even had their been one, I’m sure this information would not be in it. Most people would not care anyway.

As Tom said, “Well, at least you know it works.”

When Monday comes, I will have to call the doctor and ask him about this. It’s pretty strange.

What happens if Garry finds himself lost in a crowd of iPhone users? He could get very compounded.

Categories: #FOWC, #Photography, Anecdote, Cochlear implant, Daily Prompt, Garry Armstrong, Hearing

Tags: #Photography, Bluetooth, Cochlear implant, Garry Armstrong, Marilyn Armstrong