I am trying to remember that medicine is a rational discipline, and that noting small changes is for the birds as far as diagnosis is concerned, but...
I can't quite understand why or how but over the last few days (4 or 5) I have begun to hear sounds again, admittedly with the hearing aid (but I needed that before too), that I haven't heard in a long long time.
Sounds like: the faint beep of the entry door to my office building as it accepts my entry card; the sound of my keys jingling in the door; the sound of the Tube train doors slowly closing, and that awful 'beeping' noise they make before they do...the point is that all of those sounds (and a whole lot more) were simply off limits since July and now, unbelievably, they are back. Moreover while I can't work out words from other voices I CAN hear people speaking again - and have even 'overheard' a conversation taking place several seats away on a rattling, noisy Tube train.
My own voice now sounds to me almost normal (the only difference from pre-July days is that it sounds like I have a couple of paper cups over the ear). The sounds I still can't hear fully in my own voice are now just 's' and 'sh', but I can hear enough even of them. Other voices remain a problem and the tinnitus is pretty insistent.
Now, here is the problem. Do I take these things seriously? Is there a different baseline here? Is there (I hardly dare mention the thought) the possibility that something else is going on here other than - or alongside - SNHL?
The team at the RNTNE Hospital have been wonderful at aiming first to determine absolutely the cause of the loss. I'm still pretty sure they will conclude hair cell loss from a viral infection of unknown origin, but if there is the POSSIBILITY that the hearing loss could come from anything else I want us to dig for the answer. After all, a CI is a big deal - time, expense, irreversibility. I'm not getting my hopes up, but things HAVE changed.
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3 comments:
Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones who will get some hearing back! Mine fluctuated for a long time, and actually started to come back a little just before surgery, but I went ahead with it anyway. I was afraid that one day it would be totally gone with nothing to fall back on and I didn't want to deal with that...the wait for surgery is so long that if that ever happened it would be very quiet for a long time :).
I So hope that your experience is better than mine and that your hearing is on the upswing again...that would be awesome!!!
But I know it's unlikely too, Jennifer. The problem I have is that there has not been - until I get it on Friday (tomorrow) a properly sustained investigation and diagnosis. So I am not by any means getting hopes us, but there is definitely a change, and it is not a question of my usual (pre-July) fluctation of a few weeks good hearing followed by several days of bad. This appears to be continuing, even improving. I watched a film last night on TV - as usual with captions/subtitles - and with the volume at the normal level for my wife, and tried NOT to read the text but listen. I can't say there wasn't a bit of lipreading going on, but I got (I think) MUCH of the dialogue. Not perfectly of course - that is never going to happen again - but certainly a lot of it.
Just for the record, I continued the experiment last night and watched a rerun of an old Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett et al) without the subtitles. For the first time since I can't remember when, I got most of it. What is going on in there?
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