Warning: Lengthy and extremely lewd post to follow about my experience in Vestibular (inner-ear) Testing today. Not for younger audiences!
So today I went for vestibular testing, because I lost most of my inner ear function a few months ago and everything spins around me all the time and life fucking blows. So this is three hours of testing, and when I get there, the first thing they do is stick two gigantic earphones into my ear. Like, DEEP into my ear. It felt like I was being raped in the ear. Repeatedly. And earwax is shitty fucking lubricant. It was an eye-opening experience though – literally, because I think it hit the back of my eye – and I was like “Fuck, is this what it feels like for a woman, the first time a guy sticks his dick into her ear?”
So we moved from the ear-rape room into the ear-blow room, which is where they spend an entire minute blowing hot and cold air into your ear to move your inner ear fluid around to trick your brain into thinking you’re spinning in circles really fast. Which is awesome. And basically they’re seeing how crazy your eyes go during this whole process. But what makes it truly great is that the whole time, they’re yelling at you these random questions to keep your brain occupied so you don’t have a fucking aneurysm. So the entire room is spinning around you, and they’re just like “Name seven different vegetables! What female names begin with the letter Q?” And of course my mind, even in moments of complete mental chaos, will consistently come up with the most inappropriate answer possible. “Name something that’s white!” “Uhhhh, the Ku Klux Klan!!” “Name something that smells bad!” “Your asshole!” So I have the room spinning around me, I’m being shouted at by the random police, I have to filter myself from saying something that will make them rape me in the ear again…
And then, they take me to the “rotary chair.” That’s right, they take me from the room where things FEEL like they’re spinning to an actual fucking merry-go-round. In the pitch dark. Seriously, they strap you into a chair in this vomit-scented cylinder and spin you ‘round and ‘round. And for another hour they yell at me, “Name every country in Europe! Name six rivers in the Midwestern United States!” And the audiologist – yeah, that’s a thing, “audiologist” – she’s fascinated, she’s taking extensive notes.
And then they give me the hearing test. They raped me with two earbuds again, and then put this weird metal tiara on my head that just went unexplained. And then for a half-hour a recording of a man made me repeat various words, and he’d always say “ready” right before. Except there was one of these every three seconds, so I was always ready. It was just, “Ready? Rake! Ready? World. Ready? Pin. Ready? Fire. Ready? Lake. Ready? Over and over and over and over and fuuuuuuuuuck. And then the audiologist tells me to remove my earplugs. And, I’m like, whaaaaat? “Remove your earplugs.” So I unraped myself, and sure enough, they were pieces of foam. So how the fuck was I hearing this guy’s voice???
It turns out, I swear to God, it was the tiara. It sent out sound waves through the mastoid bone which gets interpreted directly by the brain as sound. Did you catch that? THEY MADE ME HEAR WITHOUT MY EARS. I wanted to scream at the woman, “HOW IS IT THAT YOU CAN MAKE ME HEAR THROUGH MY BONES BUT YOU CAN’T FIX A SINGLE GODDAM ONE OF MY PROBLEMS???”
And then I left. I’m different now.