Of the various maladies my body and brain have been working through the last few months, one has been perniciously persistent.
I can barely hear out of my right ear.
There isn't any obvious physical damage that anyone can see, and no obvious blockage muting my ability to listen. But as my ENT shared this week, ears are particularly slow to heal. And so it might be for me.
This was a lowlight in my rehabilitation this week, which has otherwise continued progressing at a healthy clip. So much so that my wonderful physical and occupational and neurological therapists are winding down their time with me over the next few weeks. And it will be on me to carry the full load of doing what I can to accelerate and maximize my healing.
Though I cried more this week than in any week of my life, with Teddy's third birthday on Tuesday, I have been almost ebullient during all my physical therapy sessions. I am just so damn happy to be able to move and control my body more and more from week to week.
But I almost lost my faculties on Wednesday, when I was able to shoulder press a set of three-pound dumbbells into the air 15 times. This will hardly draw the attention of NFL scouts--or NIL scouts, since I still have four years of eligibility left--but since I needed two hands to lift a drink to my mouth when this process started, I was so elated that I nearly cried when I finished my first set.
I kept my shit together, however, and labored through another set--albeit an incomplete one. But progress is progress, and I'm getting there.
There's nothing I can do on the hearing front, however, but bide my time and hope improvement comes. It could take up to a year for real change to emerge. But much to my surprise and Apple-loving delight, my ENT advised me that the latest Airpods actually have usefulness for those that are hard of hearing. My other headphones were among the casualties of the crash, so I'm eagerly awaiting their arrival in the mail.
These little glimmers of hope were welcome this week, more than usual. And as my intellectual fog continues to abate, and I begin to delve more and more into the news of the day, I've found myself gutted by what's happened at Cornell University, and the aftershocks it's having across the country.
There is so much work to do. We have so many wrongs to right. And how many cataclysmic situations are there, just like Cornell's, across our country? I hope we find out. As one of my friends said to me this week, we have to tear this down and build it back up. It's just hard to know where to start.
We can't get there without conversation, of course. And painful as Tuesday was in missing our Teddy, it was buttressed by the beautiful homage that The Columbus Foundation made possible by hosting thousands and thousands of people for conversation in Teddy's honor and memory.
I hope we heard one another. I hope we hear one another in the conversations to come. I hope what we hear and learn results in action, on critical times like election day and on all the days thereafter.
Wherever this missive finds you today, please take a moment and think of our Teddy and his beautiful spirit, and how it soared every day of his life, and will soar around us every day the rest of ours.
Wherever you are, please think of our Teddy and do something good and joyful, and think of him. It will lift him up, and us.
May we make a world worthy of the life he lived, and would have lived, and of the better world he'd have helped create for all of us--it's on us, here and now.
