Losing Music A Memoir John Cotter by John Cotter 9781571317681, 1571317686 instant download after payment.

John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came partial deafness, then dizziness & vertigo that rendered him unable to walk, work, sleep, or even communicate. At a stage of life when he expected to be emerging fully into adulthood, teaching & writing books, he found himself "crippled & dependent," & in search of care.

When he is first told that his debilitating condition is likely Ménière's Disease, but that there is "no reliable test, no reliable treatment, & no consensus on its cause," Cotter quits teaching, stops writing, & commences upon a series of visits to doctors & treatment centers. What begins as an expedition across the country navigating & battling the limits of the American healthcare system, quickly becomes something else entirely: a journey through hopelessness & adaptation to disability. Along the way, hearing aids become inseparable from his sense of self, as does a growing understanding that the possibilities in his life are narrowing rather than expanding. And with this understanding of his own travails comes reflection on age-old questions around fate, coincidence, & making meaning of inexplicable misfortune.

A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability & the limits of medical science, Losing Music is refreshingly vulnerable & singularly illuminating—a story that will make readers see their own lives anew.