Life Is Not a Stage Florence Henderson (13 ebook reader .txt) 📖

an antibiotic, I told him that I didn’t want to risk taking it due to the pregnancy. His reply was blunt. “You know, you can die from this, and you won’t have a baby.” Reluctantly, I took it, and luckily there were no repercussions.

As the due date neared, I was in pretty good shape physically and emotionally and was confident. There was no anxiety or any hint of negative thinking that I would be automatically doomed after the delivery to another horrible round of the blues. Preparation on the front end was sound prevention—I had time to devote to working out regularly at the gym to build fitness and strength. And I followed through with my promise to myself and learned Lamaze natural childbirth breathing from a record. By the time the ninth month came, when I was back in New York City, a little impatience began to set in. I just wanted to have the baby already. The Fifth Avenue bus had a lot of potholes on its route, so I took it a few times hoping the ride might help induce labor.

I don’t think the bus helped, but before long the moment arrived. Awake and aware during the childbirth, I heard Dr. Steinberg ask just before the last push, “What’s it supposed to be?”

“It’s got to be a girl with dark eyes and dark hair,” I said wishfully.

A few seconds later, he said, “Here she is.” When she got a little older, Elizabeth saw a picture taken that day of herself as a newborn in a row of similar photos of her older brothers and sister. She was upset. She felt that all the other babies were pretty except for her, pointing specifically to the puckering expression on her face. She chilled out when I explained, “No, no, no, you came out, and you were kissing me.” That was her character, a totally sweet and funny baby.

Of course, just when things are going so smoothly, life pushes forward a new challenge. Lizzie’s birth brought to a head a problem that had been slowly creeping up on me but suddenly could no longer be denied. Right after labor, I told Dr. Steinberg that I was struggling to hear what he and other people were saying. He arranged for me to immediately see a hearing specialist in New York.

The diagnosis was otosclerosis, a hereditary disorder caused by an abnormal growth of spongy bone in the middle ear that interferes with the transmission of sound. My sisters Babby and Ilean and brother Tom have also had to deal with it, and it can sometimes skip a generation. It is more common in women than men, and, as in my case, is often made worse by childbirth. It is also a misnomer that the problem is due to the bones getting harder. Rather, they get softer and sludgy, so sound cannot get through them to the nerve. If not addressed, it leads to tinnitus and you can eventually go stone deaf.

It probably started manifesting when I was a teenager, but it was so subtle and insidious that it remained under the radar for the most part. But after Barbara’s birth, I started to turn up the TV when other people seemed to have no apparent difficulty hearing at a lower volume. Later, when my children progressively began to speak, I had some trouble making out what they were saying and pressed them to enunciate more clearly. It was not their problem but mine, but one positive result is that they all developed such wonderful diction.

As it worsens, you find you’re in conversation with people and get increasingly frustrated by not hearing what they’re saying when everyone else is. You’re always thinking, “What did they say, what did they say?” Around this time, I had an exasperating meeting with the legendary lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, who cowrote musicals such as My Fair Lady and Camelot with Frederick Loewe, at his home in New York City to talk about his upcoming musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. I felt so horrible because I missed so much of what he was asking me. I realized that if I wasn’t looking directly at people, I’d lose what they had to say. I also would have to get up close, literally into someone’s face, which some people may have felt was sexy and others uncomfortable.

If you make your living as a singer, the problem begins to snowball into a nightmare. Certain instruments in the orchestra, especially the strings, begin to gradually fade away out of your hearing range. Are you certain that you’re going to hear that special note that is your cue to begin? Staying on pitch had never been a problem before, but all bets were suddenly off.

There was one blessing in disguise. Since the problem was significantly worse on one side, I could roll my head on the pillow over onto the good ear at night if Ira was snoring. Magically, all would be quiet and peaceful.

When Lizzie was a baby, I had successful surgery in New York to correct the problem. The doctor said that I might not feel the need to do anything for the other ear, but a few years later I was having trouble. When performing, I was turning up the volume on the monitors so loudly that everybody else was dying. A fellow performer and good friend, Nanette Fabray, had the same issue and had been in worse shape. She told me about the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles. Dr. Howard House did the second surgery for me, with great results. He put in an implant made of stainless steel and Teflon. You can imagine all the jokes about having a tin ear and being able to cook inside of it without any sticking. I described the difference to one journalist: “After the operation, cars sounded like jets and water from the spigot sounded like a waterfall.”

Since that time, I’ve done charity fundraising work for