Well the graph says it all. My new plan started day 96. (The borrow left of the nice looking mound on the right of the graph.) I decided to be very careful about my hearing. Listening to music 4-6 hours a day. Limiting myself to 1 hour of conversation a day. It seemed to be working very well.
On 30th November (Day 119) about the peak of that nice smooth hill I went for my 3 monthly checkup to the ENT.
Needless to say he was very happy with my progress.
I had 3 questions for him.
- How can I stop my hearing from dropping again?
- How careful should I be about noisy situations?
- What could be causing my hearing to drop?
I guess I was most interested in questions 3. In once sense I know what causes it to drop – going to a meeting, going to church, going to a coffee shop.
But what about those situations causes my hearing to drop?
Is it the multiple conversations?
Is it my talking?
Is it the background noise?
Is it just the noise level?
Why does a conversation cause my hearing to drop but listening to music doesn’t?
The ENT had no answers at all. He was sceptical of my graph. He said with what I have, my hearing doesn’t go backwards! My hearing was now better. I didn’t need to be careful at all.
This sounds strange, but I wanted to believe his words. So over the next couple of weeks I started being less cautious, having more conversations. Tentatively at first, but it gained momentum. I wore my headphones less, and I stopped listing to music as much. I tried to live more ‘normally’.
It was hard to see at the time, but looking back on the graph now it’s obvious. After my visit to the ENT my hearing went from improving to declining. The curve tells the story. It’s like I was coming down a hill I’d just climbed. But I failed to notice it at the time.
The big crash came on day 135-138.
On day 133 I had a practice for our church carols. (This is where the hill turns into a cliff on the graph at the top right,) I think in hindsight if this was all that I did my hearing may have bounced back. But this was followed up on day 135 with a wedding. I was feeling confident after what the ENT had told me and was ‘pushing’ things to see if my ear would hold out.
On day 136 I could tell things were not good. My ear was feeling bad and blocked again. But the damage was done. And it takes a day or two for the effect to appear. The next 2 days I stayed at home to give my ear some rest, but it continued to crash.
And now it’s as bad as it ever was. My ear is in pain. It’s hard to describe how aggravating the ear is. I can’t be in a conversation again or it hurts. I feel like I want to poke a pencil through my eardrum to stop the ringing. (Only I know that won’t stop it!) The ringing is so loud I can’t sleep. If you have SSHL you’ll know what I mean.
I am looking back at my graph thinking why did I do this?
Why did I listen to the specialist when I had a gut reaction he was wrong?
I don’t think the ENT has much of an idea of what’s going on. But also a professional can’t trust a person’s home measurements. If he did he’d be in trouble. He can only go on the professional hearing test results. And they didn’t show my hearing drops as the tests were done when I was at the top of the hill.
I’m going to have to put in a bit more work reading up on how to manage this!
CIST and SSHL 