Suddenly Deaf in One Ear with Tinnitus

Hi all, here's my story:

Last Friday afternoon I was doing some light work in the garden. When I went inside I suddenly had a weird full feeling in my left ear accompanied by a beep. The beep went away after several seconds but the fuzzy feeling stayed. It didn't hurt so I didn't think much of it at the time. Later that evening, I suddenly had a bout of tinnitus triggered by voices on the TV. Somewhat disturbed, I took a shower and noticed the sound of water in the affected ear was distorted and metallic. Now completely alarmed, I tested my hearing with an earbud and I couldn't hear anything anymore out of my left ear! Some frantic online searching showed me that this was sudden sensorineural hearing loss, a medical emergency, so I went to the night emergency ward showing what I had found, asked for and got prednisolone pills. I took the first one that night and went for a ENT specialist the next morning. They increased the dosage rate with a taper down, did a hearing test, drew blood for analysis and booked a new appointment 10 days after.

So far things haven't improved. I have some mild tinnitus, sometimes a bit annoying but currently bearable. They're going to do an intratympanic injection on the appointment next week. In the meantime I've been frantically reading up on any treatments and the only other thing that may help is hyperbaric oxygen therapy. The doctors however are very skeptical and claim it's not clinically proven, so I don't know what to believe anymore. Should I push for it anyway?

Deep inside I hope that some miracle will turn the tide but I'm afraid it's all in vain. As of Saturday, water does not even make distorted sound anymore; it's just dead. I think I started the pills just in time (well within 24 hrs) but I guess they didn't do their magic. I'm really depressed on how my life took such a drastic turn for the worse while I was just minding my own business. I try to keep in shape, I don't smoke, I avoid ridiculously loud music/noise. And my ear thanked me by going deaf in six hours. It's really saddening.

 

I am glad that you are getting the treatment that you need. Check out
http://web.archive.org/web/20180412...ation/diseases-and-conditions/sudden-deafness

Also check out

Ears take a long time to heal. I wouldn't be discouraged just yet. Wait at least 4-6 weeks. If you don't see any improvement, it would be a bad sign.

 

Were anti virals offered?

Consider nicotinamide riboside / NAD (there are threads on here about it).

Has auto immunity been considered? If not, look into low dose naltrexone (used in small doses for immune modulation).

 

Thank you for your encouragement. What really worries me is that I was in the "profound" hearing loss category by the time they tested it the next day; 100 dB loss. I also had mild dizziness appearing two days later. Both are bad signs for recovery.

There was another reply in this thread which asked about antivirals. They were not offered.

 

Hello,
SSHL might be a consequence of too much stress have you checked this? How old are you?
Good luck with recovery and with the tinnitus!

 

Prednisone is the standard protocol for this, and ears tend to heal really slowly. I hope you recover your hearing.

There was a post here of a guy with a similar problem to yours, and he recovered almost all his hearing after the prednisone treatment.

 

I'm 38. I wasn't really super stressed before this happened. Now though...

I realize some folks have it much worse: being completely deaf or having an incessant squeal in their ear. But I'm still shocked at how badly my sitation had turned out, even though I acted as quick as I could once I realized its severity. I only knew about noise-induced sudden deafness; never would I have guessed that one can get so deaf so quickly and sneakily by a virus or something. It's really insidious.

 

Don't apologize because you're feeling shocked. You did all the necessary measures to get better, and I really hope you will get better.

It's anecdotal, because I only know it from my father's perspective, but my grandma lost her hearing in one of her ears out of the blue for 3 months. No noise, no physical impact, nothing. Probably a virus too. They were living at the countryside in the 90s in Eastern Europe, nobody really cared, so she didn't get steroids, but recovered most of her hearing.

 

It's also important that, even if it is really hard, you try to take this easy and shake off stress and tension about it. You can just follow the medical treatment and their protocols for SSNHL, and any stress is not going to be beneficial.

Try not to think about it and take time off to rest and relax the best you can, try to keep yourself occupied with other things that absorb your attention. Try to be with your family.

 

Covid?

 

Don't go to drawing conclusions yet. Plenty of ears where this happens to, recover: sometimes to a degree, sometimes fully.

You managed to get the treatment you needed asap. Now try to relax and get sufficient sleep. Probably easier said than done, but rest will help your body to recover.

 

Yes SSNHL is a roll of the dice, like many other ailments. One second you're fine, the next one you have to deal with some unbelievable condition.

Sorry to hear about your ordeal. I think you did what you were supposed to do (see a doc and get steroids asap). Good luck!

 

Hi! New here reading a bunch of people’s stories.
My story sounds very similar to yours...and mine happened on April 13th. My hearing test showed almost complete hearing loss. I believe I’ve since gained some back but haven’t gone for test yet, maybe will in future but it’s pretty depressing so maybe I won’t. Still have severe high pitched, distorted, always changing sounds constantly going on in my right head, it can be severely exhausting. I do find that doing things I love, being in true genuine loving safe company ; deep connection really helps keep me off from minding the sounds...
How is your healing coming?

 

Hi JAMB, sorry to hear about that. I hope the tides will turn.

My situation has improved slightly my last post, but not enough to regain practical hearing. I started off with over 110 dB loss, at the last checkup on May 29 (49 days after it happened) it had improved to about 50-70 dB loss. In practical terms, I can hear some sounds again, like water droplets hitting the shower floor, but not speech.

The tinnitus has gone from low, to high, to low again. In the very beginning it was very low: mostly low-level white noise with an occasional pure tone. After 7 days I suffered an unfortunate stress peak at work (several urgent things suddenly landed on my plate). Unfortunately I didn't see that situation coming. This made the tinnitus noticably worse; it was like hearing a fridge in the background all the time, both the motor droning and the fluid noises. After the intratympanic injections and hyperbaric oxygen therapy the level went noticably down. One day after the HBOT ended the noise went up significantly, then two days later it suddenly dropped again to a very quiet background noise. It's still somewhat like a fridge but at a very low level that doesn't really distract.

I have exhausted all available treatments: first 10 days of oral steroids, then 3 intratympanic injections (one per week), then 15 sessions of HBOT. It really seems to depend on who you talk to on whether a certain treatment is deemed proven or not. My first series of doctors advocated the oral and intratympanic steroids while downplaying HBOT as "unproven". I acknowledged their expertise of course, but I did ask several times how that correlates with all the succesful and statistically significant HBOT medical trials in recent years. Never got a satisfying answer, but perhaps the unsuccesful trials simply aren't as discoverable. When I finally got my intake for HBOT (at a different hospital, after the first one had finished its options), the doc there stated "It's a pity that usually patients are forwarded to us so late; the best results are obtained within two weeks". Well darn it, that's what I told the guys in the first hospital as well! These docs were convinced that HBOT has proven beneficial for sudden sensorineural hearing loss and that there had actually been no need to wait for the hole in the eardrum to heal before starting with HBOT. It still wasn't too late for me though.

So I was a bit taken aback by all those dissenting opinions and by the idea that valuable time may have been unnecessarily wasted. At least I know that I tried everything that could possibly help. And I'm grateful that at least the tinnitus is now at a manageable level. I'm hoping that progress may still continue slowly.