What's that you say?

While my husband Anderson Cooper has been busy tonight on Anderson Cooper 360 fighting the Mexican Drug Cartel, or The War Next Door, I've been equally busy supporting him and his efforts.

No, wait. Do over.

While my husband Anderson Cooper has been busy tonight on Anderson Cooper 360 fighting the Mexican Drug Cartel, or The War Next Door, I've been completely oblvivious to his voice and images coming into my living room because I have been in a drug-induced sleep on my couch, with my arm draped over the side and Cheyenne viewing that as a fine opportunity to lick me clean me until I finally awoke.

Did I mention to you that I had a doctor appointment at 11:00 Thursday morning? There had been a funny feeling in my ear for a couple weeks, a feeling that my ear was plugged by something, a feeling of hello, I think there's a brick in my ear and I cannot hear a thing.

Four hours and thirty minutes later, I walked out of Methodist Hospital with bandages on my ear and a prescription in my purse. In the three and a half hours longer than I thought I'd be there, I'd been poked and scoped with a tube up my nose and down my throat, been sprayed through my nasal cavity with something powerfully numbing, been told I had callouses on my vocal chords and erosion on the back of my vocal chords due to acid reflux that I had as much idea that I had as I have an idea of anything else that happens while I am in deep sleep, beyond Anderson Cooper investigating the big threat that will make your blood run cold. Oh, and I also had minor surgery.

My cold blood ran warm as it dripped down my neck when the plastic surgeon took a knife to my ear in not one but two suspected places that screamed to my doctors Basal Cell Carcinoma. I didn't feel a thing beyond that dripping blood because eight shots in your ear will numb you right into the middle of your head and straight into tomorrow.

Two point eight million pounds of marijuana were seized from the border in 2008 and that's equal to the amount of completly grosse stuff seized from my ear Thursday morning. Two point eight million pounds lighter, I could hear again. I could hear my doctor ask me why my voice was as deep as it is and I could hear his lack of laughter when I told him it was because I am the secret love child of Kathleen Turner and Stevie Nicks. That doctor needs his own ears cleaned because instead of hearing me, he sprayed that seriosly numbing stuff in my nose and put a tube through there and down my throat to discover callouses that I only thought existed on my heels and erosion that I only thought existed on the Rio Grande's border patrol ethics. We're going to address that in two weeks but the mole and the brown patch on my ear screamed now to him and he sent me on my way with my new and growing chart in hand to an office in the building across the street and up 17 floors from where I sat in the only doctor's office I thought I was visiting. That office, 17 floors up, is where I met with the shots and knife.

Two hours later, that second doctor sent me on my way with two sample jars of removed bits from my ear. I had to post register at the outpatient surgery pre-registration desk so that my samples could be processed. Post registering at the pre-registration desk of Methodist Hospital is a bit confusing to the staff, not to mention the person who only recently had an entirely different set of plans for the day. Still, I convinced them that I was pre-registering for something that had already taken place in the recent past. Like Anderson Cooper, I had overwhelming evidence to prove my case, See, take a look at my ear. The underwhelming evidence of my growing sense of vertigo with the day was the wristband the registration nurse handed me with my name and date of birth printed on it, the wristband that was to safely identify me through my surgical procedures and recovery, the wristband that I handed back to her and asked her to throw away for me.

I left the building hours later than I'd anticipated when I first walked in, with cotton stuffing in and bandages over my throbbing ear, a prescription in hand and receipts for checks I'd written for medical care, checks that had big dollar amounts on them since my COBRA is in effect but details have not reached my mailbox yet so on the house means sucking my bank account dry.

And that, my friend, is how I found myself waking up on the couch a couple hours ago, which can also be called the middle of the night. No one awake but me and my husband, Anderson Cooper. He's talking but I can't hear him because even though I am 2.8 million pounds lighter in my right ear, that ear is also stuffed with post-op cotton. I'd like to apologize to my husband Anderson Cooper because I don't mean to appear that I'm ignoring him, and I don't mean to be shutting the television off while he's speaking but seriously, it's been a day of unexpected events and, my own little war behind me, I need to take myself and my still non-hearing ear off the couch and into bed.