As I sit here now, I am only an hour or so from the roller coaster taking off. I am working my shift tonight starting at 5 PM and won't be off until 3 AM. Since I have to be at the hospital by 6 AM, I'll basically just come home to shower and get dressed in some sweats and a t-shirt...then take off. Not much time to sit and mull over it.

How do I feel? I'm starting to get a little nervous. Just thinking of the hospital environment I'll be in..and the gas mask....the gas. My Doctor told me at the Pre-Op visit that they will probably have to use the gas. He swears it's changed from the early days, but I'm skeptical. So it looks like I'll have to deal with that after all. Perhaps I'll learn the rest of that song and find out who was being difficult.

I'm mostly holding on to what is up ahead, trying not to fixate on the ordeal I'm about to go through in a number of hours. I'd say I'm more excited than anything. When listening to music over the past weekend, I found myself "chasing" after it. The details are never as in my face as they should be. I look forward to a way of hearing that puts everything up front. The way it is now....it's almost like "oh don't let me trouble you, just lay there and stay on vacation...don't let me put you out" when it comes to those hair cells in my cochlea. They actually "complain" when stimulated by volumous sound, even when it's not really that loud. I'm sick of it. My correspondants swear I am going to be in heaven when it all comes together. There must be something to it when I hear one implant user after another attest to this.

So the next time I post, I won't quite be the same. I'll be in a world of silence waiting for the flood of sound that should come in it's wake. It's the point between the two doors, one closed behind me and the other standing by to open. The surgeries I had in the past were more preventative (and actually didn't do anything as it turns out, so it was all for nothing.) This is the first I'm taking a step towards gaining back some actual hearing. It gives me something to look forward to where in the past..all I had to look forward to was pain and nausea with no results and we knew this each time. That makes this time easier...so if I must be gassed, so be it.

Still....I can't believe I'm really doing this. God help me. It's all so extreme....actually doing something that could at best, have me functionally only mildly hearing impaired... is pretty damn close to the kind of thing I've dreamed about since October of 1980. As much as I dream, it's hard to believe it will really do anything, but believing is what I must do to move forward. Here I go......

Dark and dirty
like you have never seen
a mind so twisted
with thoughts so unclean.
My heart is racing
all tattered and torn
I stand here naked
as the day I was born.

Over and over I stand
I'm holding the world in my hand
I got to believe

The sky is falling
on this setting son
Echoes of silence
ringing loud and long
This isolation
is the king of pain
A lost horizon
in an ocean of flames

Only the lonely will stand
I'm holding the world in my hand
I got to believe

I've been here before,
but not as I stand here today
I wait for the dawn
ready to walk
into the light
Desert Song - Def Leppard