Friday came and went...

The assessment panel yesterday wasn't an assessment panel so much as a funny old meeting. In effect the fact that I get the MRI scan (I hear by letter today) on 29th December has kind of screwed up the timetable. My consultant - a thorough and professional man - suggested he'd rather not give a concrete and definitive picture until we have that - but suffice it to say the rest of the messages given were all consistent with the view that widespread cochlear hair cell death via SNHL has happened, and the only option now is the CI - confirmation in detail, as it were, of what we knew. Details were that the bloods were all normal - although some sign of an autoimmunity factor, but not specific. I asked if AIED was an option and heard, quite properly, this is so rare we'd have to see a much higher and specific count for that to be likely at all: frankly, he thought not. The CT scan and the other medical tests all suggested nothing other than cochlear cell death is happening down there, but clearly we want to see that MRI. Other tests (speech discrimination etc) that are intended as threshold tests - i.e. are you deaf enough, and in the 'right way' for a CI? (i.e. would you benefit?). They were all 'positive' (i.e. the scores were lousy).

We talked about the recent 'supercharged' hearing in which I'd been able to hear things I'd not here since BEFORE July (like the beep of the door entry card reader at the office, so faint most people rarely notice it; or the key clicks made when I text Jane on my mobile phone....). I am pretty sure it is not me imagining it - I've been hard on myself on that - and I am sure it did happen (6-7 days of 'super hearing', albeit with only a modest improvement in speech discrimination). We talked about it, he said such variability was 'unusual' (I suspect doctor code for 'You're fooling yourself, son') but wanted to look at it. He immediately did the (only) test for patulous eustachian tube in case it had been missed earlier (which had been running through my mind too) but seemed to conclude not much sign of that. However he did want to get, he said, a better baseline of at all possible since the variability had cut across tests.

So he proposed, between now and getting the MRI done having a high dose steroid course intravenously, watch what happens and see if the improvement looks greater than one might expect (in that you'd normally expect very little change). This is thorough and considerate. He even said that he hoped the steroid course would have an effect, if only a marginal one, a benefit for Christmas if nothing else. Jane regards all of this as him just humouring me and being considerate, but I think he's right about trying to see if the steroids get us any improvement since, if they do a markedly good job (better than last week's 'super hearing spell') we may need to check that something else isn't going on.

For now, though I'm through most of the hurdles for the CI and would prefer that to nothing (or regular intratympanic injections even if that were possible!) barring the MRI. It appears to be only the timing of that in the sequence that is now holding us up...that and the small matter of NHS funding for the process.I'll hold over the blogging for the rest of Christmas and the New Year. A very Merry Christmas to you all, and a Happy New Year for 2008.