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UPDATE.....

I had my final hearing test on July 7th, and the results were not good. There was no improvement from the previous test. I’m still mostly deaf in my left ear, and it is likely to remain that way.

The audiologist will be phoning me in the next week or two to set up a demonstration appointment to try out some different hearing aids. They’re ambivalent about whether or not I’ll be able to tolerate them, but I guess it’s worth a try. But even if they will work for me, I’m doubtful that I can afford them right now. We'll see.

AndyC wrote: ↑Sat May 30, 2020 5:41 pm Excellent.

I was completely deaf in my left ear for 2 weeks after someone touched off a .357 THV about 3 feet from me (I was still getting my muffs on when the range was declared hot). It was a huge relief when the hearing started to slowly return to the point where I considered it normal, so I'm really hoping it'll be the same for you.

I did that to myself back in '96 or '97, when I had a ND with my Model 29 and shot a round into my bedroom ceiling, right next to my left ear. It took about 2-3 weeks for my hearing to return to normal that time. That time was different then. I still had some small amount of hearing in that ear afterwards, it was just very reduced and distorted sounding for a couple of weeks, and then it came all the way back. This time, I was 100% deaf in that ear, although like I said above, I’ve gotten a little bit of it back just in the last couple of days, but it’s still almost nothing and it’s very distorted, so I have no speech recognition at all on that side. And that’s all I’ve regained in 3 weeks now. I’m trying to be patient about it, and accept that it’s a process, but also trying to be philosophical about it and recognize that I may never get much of it back this time.

I have a progress report.

The day before yesterday, I noticed a couple of times that when one of my grandkids' voices hit a certain volume and pitch, I could detect it as a thin buzzing noise in my left ear. There was no speech recognition, just a buzzing, but I could hear the noise....faintly. And then yesterday, while driving to my ENT doc's office to have my hearing retested, I found that I could hear some of the bass notes from my car stereo in that ear. They still sound muted and buzzy, but I can hear them!

On the hearing re-test, I could actually hear some of the tones in my left ear .... again, not clearly, but I could hear them. I've shown some improvement at the bottom and upper registers, but only a little bit in the middle registers....which is where most human speech occurs. My doctor called it a "marked improvement" so that’s good news. I’ve been up-rated from "profoundly" deaf, to "moderately to severely" deaf in that ear. It was enough of an improvement to warrant another injection of steroids and further retesting, so that was good news.

Going forward, I have an appointment for a 3rd hearing test in 2 weeks. At that point—if there has been further improvement—he’ll give me a final third steroid injection and then a 4th hearing test a week or two following that. He said that 3 times is about the limit of how many times he can administer a large dose of steroids like that without beginning to play hobb with the rest of my hormonal system. So, whatever I can get back by the end of the final retesting period, that’s what I’ll be living with going forward—assuming that there’s additional improvement between now and two weeks from now. If there isn’t any, well.....

Hearing aids.... My doctor said that for a hearing aid to be applicable, there has to be some speech recognition in that ear. As of right now, I don’t have any speech recognition on that side. I can hear indistinct buzzing and thumping noises if they’re in the right register and they’re loud enough. So that will have to improve to a point where I can at least vaguely understand some speech in that ear before he'll prescribe a hearing aid for me.

I so appreciate your prayers, and thank you to all of you for your generosity in that regard. My prayer going forward is for continued improvement; and if not a for complete recovery, then at least for enough recovery to the point where a hearing aid makes sense.

Thanks again to everybody.

Rafe wrote: ↑Sat May 23, 2020 2:38 pm TAM, prayers sent.

I never even realized that was a thing, that without some sort of injury or concussive damage you could just wake up one morning with that kind of hearing loss. That's extremely scary. I am now officially an insomniac.

I hope the prognosis is all wrong and that you wake up tomorrow to realize that hearing in your right ear returned just as suddenly.

Thank you brother, but my right ear is just fine. It’s the left ear that got KO'd.

I’m like you. I never realized that this was a thing, without there being either an obvious injury of some kind, a stroke (which is a type of injury after all), or an obvious disease with other symptoms. I still haven’t had a single moment of pain or other symptoms. It’s just weird.

LimaCharlie3 wrote: ↑Thu May 21, 2020 3:52 pm Here’s my 2 cents: I woke up one morning deaf in both ears. I too, am a musician. I saw 4 ENTs and an audiologist. No luck. Not even conductive hearing. A year later, the local Deaf & Hard of Hearing Center tested me. I could hear a little, very faintly. But the tinnitus was still louder. I got hearing aids and with them I can “hear”, but understanding words is hit or miss (I have significant tonal loss. I used a frequency
Analyzer to map out my deficiencies, but nobody makes a hearing aid with a decent equalizer to notch out and even it up.). I started playing in the church band and had to re-learn how to play and learn new music. I could hear it, but pitches ran together and I certainly couldn’t understand the words. But I learned to read lips and follow the music that way. It’s actually quite easy.
Now, at 7 years later, I can hear concussive noises easily. Doors, ice maker, dishes; anything with a sound pressure level above normal conversation. My hearing has improved.
My best advice for music: buy a simple old-school hearing amplifier that uses regular stereo ear buds. Then use in-ear monitors with it instead. You’ll get the full audio spectrum. I use that with the band every week and it’s a huge improvement over hearing aids with music.

Been using in-ear monitors for a long time now—mostly Sure E5s until I lost them or they were stolen about a year and a half ago, and I replaced them with Sure SE425s. Right now, a hearing aid in that left ear would be useless because there's no hearing to aid, and I have no conductive hearing on that side either. They tested for that also. I only hear left-side noise or conductive input through my right ear. Maybe down the road if I can get some hearing back, a hearing aid might be useful. But I'll check out the old school hearing amplifier. Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks everyone for the prayers.

Charles L. Cotton wrote: ↑Thu May 21, 2020 11:27 am You are in my prayers TAM.

Warning, the trial attorney in me is coming out. You contacted your doctor's office the day after symptoms first appeared. A PA "proscribed" a week of steroids treatment, but no antibiotics, rather than have you see an ENT. When that didn't help, you were finally referred to an ENT who essentially told you that, after 1.5 weeks, "it's too late." Interesting.

Chas.

Yeah.....I’m not generally a litigious-minded person, but the thought did occur to me. The flip side of it is that I can choose to either drag it out, wallow in the unhappiness, and punish someone in court (with no guarantee of winning), or I can accept what is, try to reverse it if possible, and adapt to my new reality and try to move on it it’s not possible to reverse it.

eyedoc wrote: ↑Thu May 21, 2020 12:07 pm I will let the doctor in me come out.

"The mean duration of hearing loss was six days, and there was a statistically significant correlation between the start of the treatment and the hearing improvement, i.e. early treatment carried a good prognosis.

Conclusions: Sudden sensorineural hearing loss is a common expression of inner ear problems such as viral infection, vascular osculation, or rupture of the internal ear membrane. Viral inflammation is the most commonly accepted cause for the condition. Consequently, adding antiviral such as a acyclovir to steroids increases chance of recovery, especially when treatment is early."

https://www.newswise.com/articles/acycl ... aring-loss

I read this article the morning after I saw the ENT guy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4222184/. It’s another reason why I don’t hold out much hope for improvement.

I’ve let this one marinate for 24 hours before posting a prayer request here for healing.

About mid-morning of Thursday 5/7, I noticed that the hearing in my left ear was diminished, and it sounded like I had water in the ear. There not being any other reason to suspect, I assumed that it was probably an allergy thing because seasonal allergies do get to me from time to time, and I took a Benadryl and assumed it would dry up and get clear.

Instead, when I woke up that Friday morning, I was deaf as a post in that ear. I don’t mean like I could barely hear anything, I mean like the ear had been turned completely off I couldn’t even hear it when I tapped directly on the ear. I could hear conduction sound in my right ear when I tapped on the left mastoid, but I can’t hear it at all on the left.

So I got in to see my doctor's PA that same day, and she prescribed a week of steroids, and said to let her know if it didn’t get better, but that she expected it would. It didn’t, and so late last Friday afternoon she gave me the referral to an ENT doctor, and yesterday at noon I get in to see him.

They started with a detailed hearing test, which I failed spectacularly. My hearing on the right isn’t too bad for someone my age, but they described me as "profoundly deaf" in the left ear. The ENT doc says it was most probably a viral infection of the auditory nerve, and given the 1.5 weeks since it went offline, there’s almost zero chance of coming back from it. He gave me a big injection of solu-medrol and some acyclovir to take, and told me to come back for retesting on Friday of next week. If there’s any improvement at all, then he'll rinse and repeat, and keep hammering away at it until we get back as far as we can. But if there’s no improvement by next week, then it’s time to throw in the towel.

He said he doesn’t want to give me any false hope, because he’s very pessimistic about my chances of getting even a small bit of hearing back in that ear.

I asked him about a hearing aid, and he said that you have to have hearing to aid for a hearing aid to work. I don’t have any at all. It’s as if the virus has effectively severed the auditory nerve between ear and brain.

I’ve been reading up in medical articles (not the nonsense they feed readers digest, but the stuff aimed at clinicians), and depending on what virus it was, and how badly it damaged things, there is some remote possibility of regeneration and a spontaneous recovery of hearing, but the odds are very much against it, so I’m not going to fool myself into putting any hope into that basket. If it happens, great, but I don’t expect it to happen.

So mostly, I need prayer in the following areas:

1. Obviously, for miraculous healing....if that is in God's will.

2. Physical adaptation. Without binaural hearing, I have no directional sense of where sounds are coming from, and it’s a bit disorienting. I have to learn to cope with that.

3. You’d think that switching off my left ear would switch off the tinnitus on that side. You’d be wrong. Without the buffering effect of background noise, it seems twice as loud now, and it’s a little bit crazy-making.

4. I’m a musician, and it would crush me if this interferes with that. I have always had good natural pitch, but I’m not so confident with it now. I haven’t dared to pick up my guitar yet.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and for your prayers if you’re so inclined.