It’s really incredible how much stuff doctors don’t tell you and leave you to learn on your own. During the last year or so, while recovering from my medical adventure, I had noted that I often found it difficult to follow conversations. This wasn’t something I had ever had trouble with before, at least not with conversations to which I was trying to pay attention. So, because I am now deaf in my right ear as a result of the surgery, I had kind of written this off to actual difficulty hearing. I am unable to locate sources of sound with just one ear, so background noise became very difficult to sort out, and conversations among groups in a room were very disconcerting. As my body adjusted to my new aural environment, I’ve been learning new coping mechanisms and this has been improving some. This seemed especially so in my personal life.

However, none of that really explained what was going on at work. Conference calls or even small group discussions were still maddeningly difficult to follow. These were not noisy environments. Sometimes it was just a bilateral discussion, and I would find I had completely failed to get the key facts out of what was being said. I wasn’t having any difficulty digesting information from email discussions, or even from very technical articles. It was just spoken conversations.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been having two different series of conversations with people at work. One thread has involved a lot of brainstorming and creative ideation. The other involved a fairly technical topic related to implementation of some prototypes. What I’ve been noticing is that I have no trouble hanging in the brainstorming conversations. But the technical conversations are a disaster. If someone asks a question, I can talk at length about the answer. But when listening to someone else talk tech turkey, it’s like I understand what they said, but yet it doesn’t register. Two minutes later I’m wondering what the topic was.

Now we all learn in Biology class that the left side of the body is controlled by the right side of the brain and vice-versa. However, I naively assumed that the crossed wiring stopped at the neck. Seriously, what intelligent designer would wire your left ear to the right side of your head when the left hemisphere of your brain is right there. But that’s apparently the way it works. Your ears are wired to the opposite side of your head, just like the rest of the body. We also learned in class that the right brain is responsible for feelings, big picture thinking, imagination, and creativity. Meanwhile, the left brain excels at pattern recognition, math and science, and facts and figures.

Given that I am now processing all conversations through my right brain (left ear), I’m beginning to wonder if this is contributing to my difficulty in following technically laden speech. This may well be good news for Kim when she wants to talk about my feelings or debate religion. But it doesn’t bode well for my colleagues. Fortunately, I work in an environment where lots of stuff gets documented and/or exchanged over email, so this isn’t a horrible handicap. But it is damned peculiar, and certainly not something I ever anticipated going into the surgery. I wonder if this is something I’ll adjust to more over time as well? I rather hope so.