Underwater silence. I know the sound from being tethered to the bottom of a lake once but now it’s directly threatening. The rush of fear constricting my chest yanks the vagus nerve running up my neck. Too close to the reptilian connection that hearing has to survival, my amygdala gets defensive and rakes a dull blade of resistance across my ear canal to my brain. 

It’s my first visit to the hospital since I was ten and broke my arm and had to beg my mother to take me seriously and drive me to our little rural hospital. The occupational therapist, without making direct eye contact, tells me it’s the left ear cochlear nerve that’s shot. The high pitched scream that got into my head and into her pasty white office tells me in a fast choppy doctor vernacular that the nerve that links me to the neural interpretation of aural vibration is pretty mixed up right now. I hear her words through the roar of deep water and my solar plexus locks up. I sit up straighter and straighter trying to make room under my ribs for more air, sipping it through my pursed lips like a bent human straw. I feel like running out of the room. My body remembers being in the lake at 10 with my cousin. I couldn’t swim to shore and she left me on my hands and knees staring down at her feet disappearing into the murky depths. I guess it was funny to her that I couldn’t swim, that or she thought I must be faking. 

Eventually I had an idea about how I could free myself from the stand off. While she and her mother watched I carefully white knuckled a thick braided rope that tied the floating wooden landing I’d been perched on and made it my umbilical cord. I held on with both hands over my head with my fists around the long rope and submerged under water, walked from the bottom of the lake to the shallow waters near the shore of the lake’s beach. 

As my head emerged from beneath the surface of the water I could feel them feigning calm but they watched peripherally. No one said a word when, sopping and pale, with a mix of disbelief and triumph, I padded onto dry sand passing my relatives as if they were strangers, which by that time I was sure they were.

That summer was the last time I visited my aunt’s house on school vacation or any other time and that mix of damage and catharsis is what my ear hears with the doctor sitting on her stool across from me, that muddy lake with all the scaly creatures down under the surface brushing past my legs as I move one bare foot at a time over the slippery tile of the examination room floor until she meets me at the shore with a diagnosis.

It’s odd. Just having a word for the sensation of having two ears on the side of my head, one immersed in Waterworld and one in tainted but familiar Los Angeles air, gives me a sense of release. I thought what I would be coming into their office describing would make them shake their heads. Instead they did a search of the medical data base and found Latin jargon that fits perfectly on the treatment sheet.

As I sign out from the patient log and head out to the parking lot I ask my brain, like my amygdala is a small child and we’ve just escaped a car accident,

Feel like having something sweet? Maybe a kombucha?

Chocolate, she says, anything chocolate.

Once we reach the market in Venice Beach I’m feeling buoyed by the fact that I got myself to a doctor. My auditory diagnosis wasn’t great but I faced the injury head on. I’ve crossed over from the field of neglect into a deeper shade of caring. I’ve untethered myself from another ancestral pattern of harm and placed it out there on the dock of the past for the sun to bathe with the heat of immolation. Good medicine can come from anywhere. Besides, it’s never a bad thing to know a little more Latin.