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When Music Makes You Sick
Before my brain injury, my entire life had a soundtrack. Now, I’m basically allergic to sound.
A few months into my brain injury, my neighbor got a new cat. This new cat quickly became my nemesis.
Or maybe the cat wasn’t new, but I never noticed him before a car accident bashed my head into a queasy daze and sound began to make me feel physically ill. Now I was spending long, silent stretches at home, trying to recover, and suddenly here was this cat: roaming the courtyard at all hours, warbling some deranged song.
I have never heard another cat make a noise like this, an excruciating belch of sonic violence somewhere between a yowl, a bleat, and a moan. It’s the kind of gurgling cry — oohahhoh — that you might hear for half a second on Top 40 radio, the sexy yelp of a diva out of breath mid-verse, but when repeated over and over, at odd intervals, when you are desperate for quiet, this timbre becomes torture. More than one friend has suggested it is the sound of the cat mating, but I have peeked past the blackout curtains shielding my tender brain from the late afternoon sunshine, and I have cracked the back door at two in the morning, driven from slumber to confirm with my own eyes, and I know the truth: there is no feline fuckfest, here. This is just a demon creature, a black and white ball of fur whose “Who, me?” nonchalance shall not distract from the obvious fact that he was sent here to destroy me.
It wasn’t easy for me to accept that in order to heal my concussion, I had to seal myself off from the world. In the wake of the accident, I was so confused and so sick that I could barely parse what was making me feel better and what was making me feel worse. I knew that everything I heard was now louder and somehow warped, like I’d plugged a cord into the wrong input, but I spent three months perpetually assuming I’d feel fine in just a couple more days. So as much as possible, I continued my cacophonous existence: Netflix in the evenings, This American Life while I cooked, and Spotify for every other waking moment.
But the weeks passed, and instead of getting better, I’d enter a noisy room and feel my stomach slosh, my head erupt. All summer, I was running out of restaurants and stores and parties and…
