Changing again

The character of the hearing loss is changing - again. Now the sounds of other voices are a little more distinct, but everything sounds muffled, tinny and as if my head were in a barrel. All characteristic, I see, of hearing loss related to eustachian tube dysfunction...I wonder...

Meanwhile, my next full clinic appointment (8th Feb) remains a bit of a mystery. I know who I am meeting, but not what they do or why they are meeting me. The explosion of activity in December has abated, for now. And I still don't have sight of the MRI scan.

Disheartened? A little.

Remarkable moments in film...

People in the UK won't have seen (certainly I haven't) an HBO distributed film and winner of a Sundance Film Festival award, the remarkable film by Irene Taylor Brodksy entitled 'Hear and Now'. The link here gives access to a trailer as well as press comment, interviews with Irene and other material.

No news is....annoying, actually

Is no news ever good news?

I haven't heard anything about the 29th December MRI scan yet and I'm a little concerned. After all, what I saw on the scan through the door left open by the radiographer looked to me pretty unusual and consistent with something like an AVM or an acoustic neuroma. Could be wrong - hope I am since it would complicate matters and, if a large AN and surgery were the route, would probably rule out a CI and getting any hearing back.

Meanwhile on with life. I've been keeping a hearing diary, and the variability of my (subjectuvely evaluated) hearing and tinnitus looks [and felt] enormous between 21st December and 9th January. It's shown above right. The scores on the vertical scale range are set to measure the relative quality of hearing and tinnutus against the best of both since July 2007.

The best way to do this would be to have some relatively stable metric based upon a standard test (a set speech discrimination test, for example) but we didnlt have one available. As a result, this is more a record of how the hearing seemed to me over the whole period - but it does show the range of hearing and tinnitus experienced.