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The skies were crystal clear over the Cape Ann Golf Course that day in October 1988 when Jon Sarkin, a buttoned-down chiropractor from Gloucester, Massachusetts, bent over to retrieve a tee. Sarkin, 35 at the time, suddenly felt an intense physical sensation -- a deep shiver -- go through him. Everything looked and sounded different. "I remember thinking, I'm going to die," he says today.He drove himself home to his wife, Kim, who knew with just one look that something was wrong. In the weeks that followed, the weird sensory shift became something much worse. Jon was intensely sensitive to light and sound, and the initial shiver became a distressing reverberation in his head. Ultimately it turned into a hellish roar that wouldn't quit.
For the next several months, he and Kim searched agonizingly for a cure to the ringing in Jon's ears, a condition known as tinnitus. For a can-do professional like Jon, Kim explained, not having a definitive answer to a medical issue was his worst nightmare -- a nightmare he almost didn't wake from.
The son of a dentist and homemaker, Jon Sarkin grew up in Hillside, New Jersey, with a secret passion for art. But the dutiful student set his sights instead on a career in architecture, then chiropractic, to satisfy his practical parents who thought he should become a doctor. He married Kim Richardson, a teacher, in 1986, and the couple mixed in well with the laid-back but status-conscious lifestyle of the seaside community where they settled. They soon had a baby boy they named Curtis, but even then Jon rarely slowed down. The only exception was during breaks between patients at his thriving practice, when he quietly doodled or drew imaginative invitations to family parties. He thought that one day, when he retired, he'd turn more fully to creating art; he envisioned himself, an older man, painting at the beach.
Then the ringing began to sound in his head. After months of seeing specialists, Jon was diagnosed with a swollen blood vessel pressing on his acoustic nerve. On August 8, 1989, surgeons in Pittsburgh operated to insert a small Teflon wafer between the offending vessel and the nerve. The doctors pronounced the surgery a success, and as Jon came to in the recovery room, Kim asked the question on everyone's mind: "Is the ringing gone?" Jon mouthed the word yes. And his family cheered.
A day passed as he recuperated. Then, during a visit with Kim, Jon, who was propped up in his bed, patted the covers and called out, "Come here, Ida." Ida was the family dog back in Gloucester, hundreds of miles away. In an urgent voice, Kim called for a nurse. One of Jon's doctors came to the room, gently unwrapped his bandage and found that the wound was full of blood. "Please step out now!" he shouted at Kim, and Jon was rushed to the OR.
Once again, Jon went under the knife -- only this time the medical team was racing to save his life. He had suffered massive bleeding and a post-operative stroke. "I was told that I died on the table and they brought me back," he explains. The doctors would ultimately save him, but not without having to remove the entire left side of his cerebellum, an area of the brain that controls balance, coordination and movement.
This time, when Jon came out of surgery, there was little cause for rejoicing. "There were tubes everywhere," says his sister Jane. "He had a machine breathing for him. It was awful."
Jon languished in a semi-comatose state, losing weight and suffering pneumonia and bleeding ulcers. But two months later, he began to regain consciousness. The recovery was bittersweet. What soon became clear was that he would have to relearn the most basic functions of speech and movement. He was deaf in one ear and suffered from double vision. Kim recalls that Jon, under a mass of tangled tubes, would squeeze her hand in an effort to communicate. "He'd roll his eyes, seeming to say, Can you believe this?"
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