Schwannoma Shuffle (or Slide)

Some of you may not know that acoustic neuromas are also sometimes called Vestibular Schwannoma. Okay, pretty much only surgeons refer to them as that, and now you can clearly see why we lay-people call them ANs. But I digress.

The use of either vestibular or acoustic all refers to the 8th cranial nerve (stay with me, it gets more interesting) which controls hearing and balance. I am now minus this nerve on the right side which means that I'm deaf on that side (which you already know) and my balance is occasionally challenged. Which leads me to today's post.

Do you know a dance called "electric slide?" Yes, the very one that we forbid to be done at our wedding. It's one of those group things - hop to the right, two steps left, etc. I'm sure some people love it, but I'm not one of them. I really have never needed any help to look like a clumsy idiot. And now I need even less help.

The balance thing usually manifests itself (for me) in a stumble, which in turn sometimes results in a fall, but that's another story for another day. Today's story is really about the stumble. Picture it - you momentarily loose your footing - you know, a little stumble? Most people can recover quickly from this with no one the wiser. Not me - when I stumble, it turns into a full-fledged slide and shuffle. So the other day when I found myself shuffling/sliding quickly across the kitchen floor, I had a vision of doing the electric slide. After all these years of faithfully avoiding doing that damned dance, now I seem to do a version of it spontaneously. Crap, I'm doing the Schwannoma Slide. Isn't that just irritating as hell?