Portland Oregon

Although i've been to Oregon before and lived in Seattle for 4 years, i had never done anything in Portland. I've been down the beautiful Oregon coast, up the Columbia River Gorge, and once spent two days at pristine Crater Lake, but i had never done anything in Portland other than to get gas on the way through.

That finally changed this past fall the week before Thanksgiving. I drove down to Portland from Seattle and spent 4 days wandering around town in the rain. The first day had my hopes running high, it was just past the peak of fall and the town was beautiful. That night though a huge wind storm blew most of the leaves off and the following days were plagued by sometimes torrential rain. I didn't spend as much time outside as i wanted, but what i did see told me it was a pretty city.

Portland has a lot of very pretty city parks, like this one up on a strange big hill.

Portland has a great Art Museum relative to the size of the city, and many other interesting smaller galleries scattered around town. They have a pretty good zoo,(and if you want to avoid the crowds go there during a major rainstorm). The city has a lot of fantastic restaurants for every meal, and they have very good beer.

I finally upgraded my ancient, generations old iPhone, to an iPhone 4. I was shocked that the iPhone 4 actually has a usable camera. So now you can expect phone pictures on this blog, like these. That's my finger in the first one. It took a long time to learn not to do that.

Maybe it was more apparent than usual after spending 3 weeks in Manhattan, but what struck me most about Portland was the friendly attitude i encountered everywhere that i went. It helped that i was from Alaska, as that seemed to be a location that was on everyone's mind as a vacation spot of interest. Even so, i found my time being sucked up at times by conversations with perfect strangers. One night a friend of a friend, a person who's existence i had just learned about, met up with me and showed me around his part of town just so i'd have something to do that evening. Thanks, Sterling, for the time and the fine Scotch!

All the leaves blew off the trees and onto the street 4 hours after i got there.

A Portland residence. Portland must have a lot of recycling laws, because this guy has 6 different kinds of garbage cans in front of his garage.

I couldn't tell if these were wood or resin. The iPhone is bad in low light.

Portland is full of neat little shops like this one.

As nice as Portland is, i wasn't there for fun and games. I had come to receive treatment for chronic Tinnitus and what i didn't know until then had a name: hyperacusis. While tinnitus is a sound caused by your brain trying to fill in areas with sound where it isn't getting a signal, hyperacusis is a problem with hearing everyday sounds at an abnormally loud perceived volume. It often occurs along with tinnitus, and some believe they are related. The hyperacusis i was experiencing had been worse in the four months following my introduction to tinnitus. During that time I found restaurants, construction, and retail stores like Home Depot with backing up forklifts to be deafening to the point that i tried to avoid them altogether. The really weird thing about it was that it was so loud to me that i'd have sworn you'd have to yell to be heard, but i could hear anyone talking in a normal tone of voice without any problems at all.

One night it didn't rain for a few hours so i went walking. Portland has hundreds of tons of bridges and crazy complex highway overpasses. This old double decker, which raises in the middle accommodates trains and pedestrians on the deck, and public trains and cars on the upper deck.

On the bridge. The tracks in this one were occupied by robot trains. There are actual signs warning that the trains had no drivers in them.

I went to the the Oregon Tinnitus & Hyperacusis Treatment Center, run by Dr. Marsha Johnson. Dr. Johnson, who is on the board of the American Tinnitus Association, was more helpful and demonstrated more genuine concern about my problems than any of the other doctors i spoke to over the phone or in person over a period of three months. And she is about as close to Alaska as you can get on a plane.

Due to the type of tinnitus i was experiencing, i was a good candidate for something called cochlear retraining therapy. Cochlear retraining is a long term treatment that teaches your brain to filter out the bothersome noises of tinnitus by mapping out perceived problem frequencies and embedding them into a white noise "mask." The idea is that the patient listens to this masking noise in the background of specially chosen music every day for two to four hours for up to two years. During that time the patients brain will learn edit out the offending noises. That's the gist of it. It's an FDA approved treatment and has an 80% success rate in improving tinnitus. There are no claims that it will cure it, but some patients do report a complete removal of the sounds in their heads.

It takes four days to get set up. Dr. Johnson ran some tests on me and we mapped out the sounds in my head. Unfortunately, my hearing loss was pretty screwed up and i hear four frequencies of sounds ranging from low to high. The program is only designed to treat one sound, so i had to make the tough choice of choosing which sound i wanted to get rid of the most. The least bothersome noise i hear sounds a lot like the refrigeration sounds in the frozen foods aisle at the grocery. I went with the highest pitch noise.

After the frequencies are matched, the doctor has to order what is basically an extraordinarily expensive mp3 player from the company that developed the program. In the U.S. it's called Neuromonics. If things go well a few days later you can leave with the device in hand, and start treatment immediately.

Thirty minutes outside of Portland is one of the prettiest waterfalls in the country. Multnomah Falls is in the Columbia River Gorge. The two falls together plunge 620 feet over cliffs made from old lava flows. Driving along the gorge and looking at the rainforest growing over strangely carved basalt cliffs i couldn't help but notice the similarity to Hawaii.

You can walk on a paved trail to the top of the waterfall, and from there several more miles through the rainforest.

Shortly after this bend in the creek it plummets off a sheer cliff for 542 feet (165 m).

It's been 9 months now that i've been on the program and my tinnitus has improved greatly in that time. It's a very slow, subconscious process, with days that can still be challenging, and others that i barely notice at all. I've changed some of my habits. For instance, i used to like a completely quiet room to sleep in. Now i sleep with a fan on just outside to generate white noise, which masks some of the sounds. Only in the last three months have i really been able to enjoy music again. Listening to low quality music or music that has lots of constant high frequency noise can still be irritating so i try and avoid that as well. I've found that the most important factor is simply getting enough sleep. Nothing makes a larger difference in volume of the tinnitus than a lack of sleep. Stress can also be a major contributor. In the meantime i'm supposed to make a couple of more trips down to Portland for checkups on the therapy.

Nothing i've ever dealt with has affected me as much as tinnitus. It is apparently the number one injury for American troops in battlefield. I'm lucky enough to be living in an age where they have only recently begun to develop working treatments for the disorder. It's also a unique affliction in that researches seem to be very close to finding a real cure for the problem in our lifetime.