A special message from Aaron

Today is June 5. It’s the first Wednesday of the month. This means, if we follow our normal posting schedule, we should be dropping our first of two episodes for the month today.

Ordinarily, the three of us get together on the first weekend of every month, record both episodes, and then drop them accordingly as the month progresses. This month, however, Rebecca and I had plans to attend a live recording of Small Town Murder (a true-crime comedy podcast that we both love) in Nashville. We made arrangements with Rodney to record on Sunday afternoon via Zoom– Rebecca and I in Tennessee, Rodney back home in Illinois. Easy enough, right?

For several days before my departure from Illinois, Rebecca and I questioned if I should even be making the trek to Tennessee. We wanted to see each other. We certainly wanted to see the show. I was not in good shape, though, having spent a couple of consecutive days suffering the symptoms of what appeared at the time to be a nasty sinus infection. I was congested. I had a low-grade fever and a headache that I could not assuage. It felt like someone had punched me in the face, and I was having difficulty finding the right cocktail of cold medicine remedies to feel any relief.

As the week progressed, my condition began to improve. By Friday, I was still congested, but I had no fever or headache, so we decided that I could still head south. It’s a not-quite eight-hour drive from my doorstep to hers. It was a fairly uneventful drive– traffic was light, the weather was nice– until I hit Kentucky. My excursion into the mountains, the change in elevation and pressure, began to make my ears pop. Like nobody’s business. It felt like I was in an airplane to Seattle with no chewing gum available. By the time I reached Maryville (the Tennessee town where Rebecca resides), I, once again, felt like I had been punched repeatedly in the face.

I got to Rebecca’s place late enough that there was little time for much more than eating dinner and going to bed. I slept like an infant after such a long drive until about 4:30 in the morning. It was this wee hour of the morning that my left ear decided to begin painfully pulsating and throbbing. It was a dull ache, nothing overly dramatic, but enough to prevent me from going back to sleep. I read The Book of Illusions on my Kindle in the dark until just before 6:00 am when I was the not-so-proud recipient of a sharp, albeit brief, stabbing pain to the left side of my head.

I made enough noise getting some Ibuprofen that I woke Rebecca up. It was while I was explaining the situation (and why I was rooting around in her medicine cabinet before dawn) that she realized that I had blood drizzling out of my left ear.

I officially finished The Book of Illusions while sitting in the waiting room of an urgent care facility in Maryville, Tennessee. Shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with an otitis media with an unspecified perforation of the tympanic membrane. In layman’s terms: an ear infection and a ruptured eardrum.

Well, that’s just great.

Thankfully, the clinic in Tennessee accepted my Yankee insurance. The doctor (who, it should be added, looked more like Victoria Jackson playing a doctor on Saturday Night Live than an actual, you know, certified doctor) charged me $62, wrote me a prescription for amoxicillin to treat the infection, and told me that I should follow up when I get home to make sure that everything was healing properly. She made no restrictions other than requesting that I not submerge my head underwater and seemed optimistic that this injury was no big deal and would heal on its own.

Rebecca and I went ahead and did our day tour of some of Nashville’s sights (we visited Ryman Auditorium, toured Chief’s, the bar owned by my favorite country singer, and ate dinner in a neat restaurant that had ACTUAL STINGRAYS swimming in an aquarium near our table). We went ahead and redeemed our tickets for Small Town Murder. We also, however, found ourselves repeating everything over and over in casual conversation because I couldn’t hear a damn thing she was saying to me. She couldn’t hear most of what I was saying half the time either because my clogged-up ears were making my own voice rattle around in my skull like a handful of ball bearings in a coffee can, so I was speaking slowly and quietly to stave off another headache.

Ultimately, by Sunday, it was decided that there was no feasible way that we could record our podcast this weekend. I tend to lead the discussion and that is difficult to do when I can’t hear anything. Listeners would be burdened with two whole episodes of Rodney and Rebecca continually having to repeat themselves so that I could follow what was going on around me. We made plans to hold off recording until today, to, at the very least, record our bonus episode, even if we’d be dropping it a day late.

Today is the big day. I am four days into my ordeal and I still can’t hear anything. Change of plans, again. We’re going to give me another weekend to recuperate and then drop both of our normal episodes in the last two weeks of June. We hate doing it, but our discussion of Paul Auster will be a lot more palatable to the audience without repeated occurrences of me saying, either too loudly or too quietly, “What? Can you repeat that?” every ninety seconds or so. All three of us really enjoyed this novel and an author as elegant as Paul Auster deserves a much-more sophisticated approach.

To that end, yesterday, I did as the Great Smoky Mountain Barbie doctor instructed and went to a physician here for follow-up. The infection is cleared up. The burst ear drum is not, but appears to be healing as it should be. I am still contending with the symptoms of my nasty sinus infection, which is only exacerbating my inability to hear, and turns out to possibly have been more than just a sinus infection as Rebecca has started showing some of the same symptoms after I returned home to Illinois.

As near as we can tell, Rodney is not ill. He is being very gracious, though, in following my lead in knowing whether or not it is appropriate to record. This is information gleaned from text messages. I haven’t talked to him. I wouldn’t be able to hear him if I had.

The crew here at Just In Case We Die sincerely apologizes for this break in our normally-scheduled routine. If we could avoid it, we would. With that said, we do promise our normal two episodes for June and they will drop in the last two weeks of the month. We should be back to our normal schedule for July.

Thank you for your understanding. We’ll see you soon,
Aaron