i was going through the hearing loss literature online today and having my daily talk about it with minyin, and at some point she tactfully pointed out that i should be prepared for this to be a lifelong condition. and at that i had a fit of angry tears suddenly. i said to yen and von that i feel frustrated not only because i've been cooped up at home for a while now and have not improved much, and am sick of taking pills five times a day, but also because there are no explanations, and explanations matter to me. not only was the onset sudden and without apparent cause, it appears to be a condition about which little is known. minyin has been researching the matter in her university library and explaining to me that sensorineural hearing loss is one of the more serious kinds of hearing-related problems (and in part particularly becos we don't know a whole lot abt it) and that there is nearly nothing that can be done for it, and its cause is very little known. (she suggested four possibilities: it could be a a viral infection, hence all the antivirals. it could be something like a "ear stroke", hence the vasodilatory medication. it could be an autoimmune problem, which is why i'm being given steroids. it could be physical trauma or some sort of tumour pressing on the nerves, in which case i'm waiting to get scans done and meanwhile confined at home and denied "activities". moreover there is nearly nothing that can be done for the tinnitus, except to create background noise, which of course eventually just makes you even deafer.) and that is hard for us to accept, isn't it? we've always been told we're living in the age of science and we therefore expect medical science to be able to explain everything and when it can't we feel shortchanged. and of course we think that if we behave ourselves and do all that the doctor tells us we will be cured and when we find that no cure is available we feel deceived. and at the same time we're aetiological creatures who need explanatory narratives to make it all make sense. and i suppose because we're bright people who've been trained all our lives to ask why and to attempt to understand. i wish we were simpler and less intelligent and can simply trust to everything else instead of wanting to know why why why.