Supranormal

Maybe there's nothing wrong with you.

An x-ray image of lungs with trailing red hearts

After the first chest x-ray I ever had, back in 2019, my doctor called personally to deliver the results. Always an ominous sign, at least in the movies. I still remember taking the call in the driveway while trying to maneuver my toddler into the car.

This was pre-covid and I’d had a lingering, substantial cough following a routine virus for over a month. While I wasn’t thrilled with the cough—it was physically exhausting and mildly alarming on both personal and social fronts—I had been mostly confident that my body was working it, whatever it was, out. More likely I was in denial, not wanting it to be something more.

Some families do early heart attacks, some pass along weak bones or wobbly wiring in the joints. My family does…has done…cancer. My mom lost all three of her siblings to cancer, two before the age of forty, and both she and my sister have had breast cancer. My dad racked up six different cancers, although that’s somehow not what finished him in the end.

That’s a lot of cancer. That’s also, at least in my immediate family, a lot of survival.

My mom and sister have been cancer free for years; the scary, uncertain months of their diagnoses and treatment now a distant blip. And while my dad has passed, he too had a knack for defying both science and death. Given this history, my own body has walked through a good chunk of its life feeling both genetically cursed and blessed: impending doom meets feisty resilience and strength.

In the driveway, my doctor asks if I grew up around cigarette smoke. I say I did not. She says the radiology report shows some curious findings in my lungs. The term “hyper-expansion” is used, along with “suspicious” and “chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder,” or COPD.

This doesn’t make sense to me or my doctor. COPD? Not my thing. But still, this cough, now entering its sixth week. And there was that bout of mild asthma a decade ago.

My doctor refers me to a pulmonologist, where I’m fast-tracked through a two-month wait list. Also an ominous sign. My mind is vaguely certain that its worry is silly, and that this attention is unwarranted, even an embarrassment. There are actual sick people who need care far more urgently than me. But still.

Before seeing the specialist, I’m run through a series of breathing tests that by definition—the “test” part—make me feel like I don’t know how to breathe. I breathe with tubes in my mouth. I breathe inside an enclosed, port-a-potty-like chamber with clear, self-conscious walls. I breathe with a smile on my face, like someone who isn’t sick.

When I do see the pulmonologist, the visit is so mundane as to validate my embarrassment at all the fuss. I do not have COPD, or any other terrible lung condition. What I do have is big lungs, with above-average capacity for breath. I’m given an albuterol inhaler and some other things to help with the cough, which clears up in its own good time.

The pulmonologist doesn’t say this, but I come away from the whole experience feeling a little bit special. Not sick, but not normal either. Big lungs. I come away thinking I was built to breathe.

Excuse the humble brag but…that wouldn’t be the last time I left the doctor feeling special.

Five years and a few high-voltage scans of my head later and I’m given a name, a reason, for the auditory symptoms that have become increasingly troublesome. Superior canal dehiscence syndrome. A diagnosis. I have holes in my head.

As part of the work-up to determine my eligibility for surgery to repair said holes, I sit in the testing chair once again. For hours, I hear beeps and words in cramped sound booths, with disorienting puffs of air shot in my ears, with my head turned this way, and then that. I leave looking ashen, considerably older. I try not to throw up.

The results, presented to me by the interpersonally unskillful man who will ostensibly guide a knife, or more likely a small saw, through my skull, confirm what I already know: I hear too much.

While my hearing is compromised at certain frequencies for reasons I won’t get into the skeletal anatomy weeds on here, the holes in my head also give sound—birds chirping, traffic, grocery cart wheels on pavement, my own heartbeat—unfiltered access to my brain. Above average sound conduction, for better or worse. Supranormal, the report says.

As of this writing, I’m a little over two weeks into another cough in the wake of a routine virus. Two trips to the doctor, one trip to urgent care, and one chest x-ray later, the verdict is in: I’m sick, but nothing’s really wrong with me. I’m not getting any above-average report cards, but I’m not getting impending doom either.

So I’ve been thinking about lungs and breath, about my lungs and breath. I’ve been wondering if these periodic, month-long coughs are the cost of having “big lungs,” too much space for things to get stuck. I’ve been thinking maybe I need to breathe more deeply, improve on my exhale.

I’ve also been thinking about what Chinese medicine has to say on the lungs, that they are the spongey keepers of grief. I think about the news, the devastation of lives and families, of things that matter. I think maybe there’s nothing wrong with my lungs, maybe they’re just attuned to all the fear and sorrow in the breeze. Maybe a month-long cough is this particular body’s reasonable attempt to process the weight of where we are. Maybe I was built for this and need not to be fixed, but to fine tune the use of my instrument.

Same, too, with the holes—well, now hole, singular, since the surgery—in my head. The surgeon’s best guess is that I was born this way, it just took some time for the defect to cause problems.

In a world, at at time, with so much noise, what’s the point of supranormal hearing? Maybe, likely, no point at all. Maybe I’m reading into it like I do.

But also maybe, better listening. Listening between the lines, if that’s a thing. Hearing the finer points of what the world, and my own reverberating voice, has to say. It would seem as though I was made for this.

I was only joking about feeling special. Maybe half joking, because I do think this is what we’re meant to do with these bodies and their illnesses and quirks. Not see everything that hurts as a gift. Ick. But see that maybe there’s nothing wrong. Maybe outside of average—above or below, doesn’t matter—is precisely the superpower the world—and our own tiny, interconnected lives—needs.

So what’s your thing? In what, perhaps grossly inconvenient or uncomfortable, ways does your body or heart or mind defy the bell curve of normal? Tell me. I want to know. ♥️

xo,
Christa