Sogger’s Blog

Nobody believes it, but I am deaf. My wife says it’s selective hearing, but I choose not to listen to her.

I was reminded of my deafness today. It not being England, May tends to bring out the sunshine, so we went off to the restaurant for lunch. No space outside meant that we had to eat inside the restaurant, where it was already quite loud and busy. It is in exactly this circumstance where I am reminded that I have tinnitus and that French is not my language. If you are in a similar situation, but where people are speaking your native language, you can generally follow the conversation, filling in the gaps even if you don’t catch all of the words. However, if it is not your language, you have to concentrate that bit more in order to put things together or formulate an answer - at least, that’s what I have to do. And I can tell you that it can be very tiring.

Today, as the conversation whipped around the table, it was all I could do to keep up with things - a constant, loud background noise meant that I could barely hear what was being said. It was all I could do to watch the visual signs, laugh wholeheartedly at the correct moment and give nodding encouragement or frown at the right moment, taking my cue from the others around the table and hoping that I hadn’t got things wrong, laughing as a colleague described his mother’s funeral, that type of thing. I felt like I was inside a fish bowl, looking out at the people, seeing their mouths move, hearing a sound that sounded mostly like “Flob-a-lob”.

It’s always been there, but having to make an conscious effort to follow a conversation brings it,  unlike the words, sharply into focus. Once, many years ago, a friend confessed to me that she found me aggressive when we were in a group sitting in the pub. I think it is because, in order to hear better, I need to lean across the table into the conversation and this can come over as aggressive. Or maybe it’s the wild gesticulating and snarling features. I don’t know.
Every night, I go to bed, where, instead of silence, I am treated to a high-pitched screech in my left ear, and a low-pitched hum in the right ear. It’s funny how it’s a constant companion, but you don’t even know it’s there until exactly the point you don’t want to know it’s there.

Luckily though, as I am writing this, I am sat on the terrace as the sun goes down, listening to the birds singing. I’ll enjoy it while I can. “What’s that, shift your arse and wash the pots? Sorry darling, I can’t hear you”.

One year ago, I read very few blogs, and the thought of actually writing one made me cringe: lack of confidence, poor ideas, badly written, leaving you open to criticism. That was until John visited. He persuaded me to give it a go and I’ve never looked back. OK, so I do have poor ideas, badly expressed, however, for me it is a creative outlet that definitely beats sitting in front of French television or Sky News.

The problem is finding the time and the inspiration. I have several ideas that never make it here because I can’t see how to develop them and spin them out to a full post. That is why I have decided to add little soglets to the blog. Here is the dictionary definition:

Pronunciation “sog-lut“: a short blog post designed to provoke a short-lived emotion, usually a curve of the lip or a roll of the eyes, and to be immediately forgotten” (source, Lyon, 2008).

The advantage is that I can write a bit of nonsense quickly without having to develop it any further. The disadvantage being that I can write a bit of nonsense quickly without having to develop it any further.

So anyway, I might spew a few of these out when the spirit takes me.

Last week, my boss and I hosted a 2-day training session for a major customer in Switzerland. The training was in English because the customer, a large industrial manufacturer, had French and German native speakers in its ranks. It all went very well, and the last session in the afternoon of day 2 was a question and answer session. We tried to set the tone by keeping it “high-level”, future directions for the product etc. In order to show willing, my boss wrote down the questions and we promised to take them into account during the upcoming roadmap discussions.

All went well and the questions threw up some interesting ideas. However, one attendee was well known for extremely long, pointless, unanswerable questions and the moment we had been dreading arrived as his hand shot up and he managed to butt his way in. He started on his question/monologue and eyes in the room glazed over.

My boss, ever attentive, was writing down the question. Hoping to exchange raised eyebrows, I turned to him, only to notice that instead of writing down the question, he was repeatedly writing the French equivalent of,

“What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole”.

I coughed discreetly and nodded at the large screen behind us: unfortunately, he hadn’t realised that his laptop was still plugged into the video-projector, so his words were projected, large-as-life, on the screen behind us. So much was the questioner into his subject that he never flinched and carried on with his question - he is a German speaker, so I don’t know if he knows any French. Unfortunately, many people in the room did, so ripples of laughter permeated throughout (there were 22 attendees). A quick tug of the cable caused the screen to go blue and finally broke the questioners attention.

Finally, the 10 minute question was fended off with an “OK, we will take note of your concerns” and the training course was over. Afterwards, the questioners boss came up to us and said, “Well, yes, X can be rather annoying can’t he?”.

So the golden rule is: Always check your video-projector cable isn’t plugged in when writing an insulting comment about an important customer. Take this with you through life, and all will be well.

Why the title? Well, in one of my favourite films, The Shining, Jack Nicolson spends the whole winter holed up with his family in a remote hotel in order to finish writing his novel. However, one day his wife discovers that he has written hundreds of pages, all of them saying only, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. One of the most famous scenes in the film (the one you see on the classic poster) is when he breaks down a bathroom door, pokes his head through and with a malicious smile says, “Here’s Johnny”. Class. Anyway, if you haven’t already seen it I’ll let you go and watch this cinematic classic and I’ll get back to writing up the questions ready for our roadmap meeting (omitting some of them of course).

It’s been a while since I wrote about epilepsy which seems remiss given that this is the reason I created this blog in the first place. I want to give you an update before a visit to the neurologist later this week so you can see what a lengthy process it is just trying to get the dose right, and the implications of not doing getting it right.

I last went to see him 2 months ago armed with the results of a brain scan, a bad reaction to the generic version of Lamictal and a disappointing reaction to the last random mix of medication (do you sense a hint of resignation?). He added a new tablet into the mix this time: Tegretol. He started me off on 200mg a day, with a prescription for 400mg if it didn’t work out.

It seemed a god time to start a new medication because the following week we were off on holiday for a week and I would not have to worry about serious side-effects happening in front of my colleagues (collapsing, that sort of thing) and the awkwardness that would ensue. My pharmacist was worried about me though (that’s a positive side-effect of constant pill-taking - you get to build relationships in unlikely places), suggesting that the thin air in the mountains might be a problem for someone like me (I’ve never seen anything on the web about people suffering from increased seizures when at altitude. That said, I haven’t read many success stories of the type, “Epilepsy Sufferer Conquers Everest”).

So off we went skiing, armed with sunscreen and a shiny new collection of pills. All was fine (apart from me falling over and ending up in hospital for X-rays). The week after, and back at work, it was back to the old routine: stressful meetings followed by seizures, lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes (the seizures, not the meetings unfortunately), endured in private or endured by my wife who generally has to talk me through it. After a seizure a day (”keeps the doctor away”…err, no, that’s not right), I decided to up it to 400mg a day. “Ah, I told you so - mountains and epilepsy don’t mix”, nodded the pharmacist, sagely but incorrectly.

That did the trick for the weekend - no seizures, but an inconclusive result, given that I wasn’t at work, and playing football with the kids has never been a seizure trigger (for me). But wait a minute what’s this (apart from beginning a sentence with a preposition?)…those blotches on your fingers are getting quite widespread and are very, very itchy, as are your back and legs. Now, my fingers are extremely painful and the effect seem to correspond closely to the side-effect described as “cutaneous eruptions”, even if the list of possible side-effects, as for most epilepsy medication, is 2 pages long. And my legs are no longer itching: they are extremely painful given that I have scratched them so much that they are bleeding.

These are mere side-effects, the main point is that they stop the seizures, right? Well yes, that’s the idea. Except, well, no, they haven’t. They seem in the short term to have stopped the seizures I was having at work that I put down to stress, but, in the meantime I have taken to cycling to and from work, and, every night last week, at the same point on the route home, I have had my often interesting and not always unpleasant jamais vu seizures. For those that don’t know, jamais vu is the sensation of feeling that you are somewhere new even when you are somewhere you know intimately. For example, in the past, I have had this sensation while trying to find my way back to the bedroom from the bathroom (luckily not in the other order) and I also wrote a similar episode here. In this case, for example, I got to a roundabout I pass every day, but I didn’t recognise it and had the feeling that I had taken a different route home - I knew it was the right way because I was on my bike, cycling home, and knew I was having a seizure. Stopping for a minute, it passes, and I can get on my way again. The downside of this is that it leads me to feel tired and irritable afterwards (although these are two characteristics that are often attributed to me anyway).

The positive side of this latest batch of seizures is that it confirms that I have two common triggers: stress and hyper-ventilation. So all I need to do to be cured is to do is avoid working and stop exercising! Unfortunately, it’s not as clear-cut as this, so I guess the neurologist will be prescribing another cocktail - don’t get me wrong, this is completely normal as no two person’s symptoms are identical - and even mine are difficult to pinpoint.

Watch this space as I write again to regale you with another set of bizarre reactions. If I can remember where I left my laptop, that is.