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Hearing aid

 I realized after I sent out last night’s report that I didn’t show what the hearing aid looks like.  It looks like this in the ear: There is a clear plastic tube that goes from the top front of the ear down into the ear canal.  The hearing device hangs on the outside behind the ear, the tube leads to the part that sticks in the ear, and there is a little tag of monofilament that hooks in the outer ear to hold everything in place. If we set it on a table it looks like this: For size perspective, we can see it’s a lot smaller than my thumb.  
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Judy has hearing loss

 Her hearing has been pretty good as we age, but she had a bad ear infection a couple years ago and lost a lot of the hearing in her right ear, as illustrated by this audiogram.  The way this chart reads is the bottom axis represents frequency.  The higher the sound, the farther right on the chart.  The left axis represents volume.  The farther down on the chart, the louder the sound has to be for each frequency to be heard.  For normal hearing on a young person, all the lines would be pretty much horizontal and within the 10 to 20 range. For our purposes, there are a couple of extraneous lines, the ones with the dotted lines.  The two important ones are the solid ones, the “X”s for her left ear and the “O”s for her right ear.  Her left ear can hear almost everything within the normal range of hearing.  The volume has to go up a little for her to hear the higher pitched sounds.  Her right ear drops off pretty fast.  The volume has to be unrealistically loud for her to hear any high pitched sounds out of her right ear.  An odd result of disparity is that pretty much everything she hears seems to be coming from her left.  She has lost the ability to hear something and look right at the direction it’s coming from. Today she got a hearing aid in her right ear.  We got the audiologist to run the audiogram again; hearing aid in.  It came out like this.  There are still two dotted lines to try to ignore, but an additional line of importance superimposed; the “A”s.  That is how her right ear hears now, practically the same as the left ear; the “X”s. She spent the rest of the day marveling at how much stuff she could hear, how she could tell which direction a sound was coming from, and how much we could turn down the television and she could still understand the dialog.  Great fun. Here is how it looks when she’s wearing it. Hard to tell. 
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Hardware Man

 We made the Monday trip to Corpus for the three-week follow-up with the surgeon.  He said I’m doing awesome.  I think that was the technical term he used; that’s what I heard anyway.  The staples are now out, so I guess we’ll need a newer nickname than zipper neck. Remember how my neck looked before?.......I sent out an x-ray of it........This scrolling down thing is your chance to escape before the graphic x-rays show up, if you don’t want to see them........It looked like this.Lots of hardware. Almost all the old hardware came out.  There were two broken-off screws that got left in.  They put in two new bone grafts, then they put twice as much hardware back in.  Now it looks like this; screws, plates, and rods: They took this while the staples were still in the back of my neck.  Looks like they had a long way to go to get from there to my spine. Anyway, now I’m more hardware than neck.  They’ve got me screwed down so tight, these fusions should take though.  We’ll know in about two more months.  Six months for sure.  Or twelve. From the front it looks like this. The plates and screws in the middle are on the front.  The outside rods and screws are on the back.  You can see the neck staples behind them. Here is the staple collection after. That’s the staple puller.  It distorts and pulls them at the same time. 
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Happy Birthday Judy!

I’m being nice to her.  We went to Bed Bath and Beyond, but they didn’t have what she wanted.  She went to Michael’s.  Nothing there either.  We split a burger at Whataburger for lunch.  She found what she wanted at Walmart.  We came home and she made a birthday cake.  She can have anything she wants for dinner.  She chose leftovers. There is not much I can actually do for her but follow her around all day.  I’m being nice to her.  She makes it easy.  Happy Birthday Judy.