Synaloepha

Synaloepha (sin-a-lif’-a): Omitting one of two vowels which occur together at the end of one word and the beginning of another. A contraction of neighboring syllables. A kind of metaplasm.

Thechoes in my head wouldn’t stop. It was like I had a reverb generator embedded in my brain. Conversations got crazy. Everything said would overlap with everything else. I jokingly called my problem “Pink Floydosis” after the rock band who frequently used a reverb echo effect in their music.

People who knew me knew they needed to make a five second pause between words when they spoke to me. The five seconds let the reverb fade between words so I could understand them. This was a huge accommodation and I was extremely grateful.

I desperately wanted my impaired hearing fixed. I want to an audiologist who told me I should be happy I could hear anything at all. I shopped around and was pretty much told the same thing by all of them. So, I started on neurologists. I must’ve seen fifty of them. They told me they could not detect any abnormalities in my brain. Finally, I went see a neurologist who recommended a neurotologist—an ear surgeon, not an audiologist; a simple hearing tester. The neurotologist’s name was Dr. Drum and he was working with Thomas Edison’s Great, Great, Great Grandson, Watts.

They were trying to create micro device capable of “dereverberating“ sounds. It would be implanted in the ear “just on the other side” of the eardrum. They had been experimenting by reading “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into a dummy ear with the device implanted in it. According to Watt, they were close to being successful in their trial runs. They had managed to find a way to keep the ear from catching fire during dereverbration.

I volunteered to be their guinea pig. Two months later Dr. Drum summoned me to their laboratory for a test run of the “Devreverberater 28.” They paid my way to Panama and picked me up at the Panama City Airport. We went directly to the laboratory they had set up in a storage shed with running water and electricity. There was an operating table set up under a bright floodlight.

I put on a white gown and laid down on the table. The prepped my left ear. We were only doing one ear in case the operation failed, and possibly, made only one ear deaf. I felt like an experimental rat. The anesthesia kicked in.

When I woke up, I had a giant tropical patterned bandage on my ear—I couldn’t hear anything through it. The bandage was removed two weeks later. The reverb was gone! But there was a slight downside. Now, everybody sounded to me like they had been sucking helium. I didn’t care. The doctors operated on the other ear, and I flew back home.

Six months later a side effect emerged that nobody could’ve predicted. When I get excited, my voice becomes a helium voice! So, I’ve learned to be quiet until I calm down.