Part IV
I used Candy Crush Saga to pass the time between audiology to otolaryngology. On 20 March 2014 the doctor with the funny head mirror appeared. He asked if I complained about pulsatile tinnitus and now the dreaded SHL, sensorineural hearing loss. He reviewed the audiogram and almost shrieked at the collapse of just one ear. He asked when I first noticed symptoms, now nearly 40 days ago. I was outside the window for any treatment and he suggest I just give up on my hearing.
I asked if there was anything that could be done, or it was completely pointless and would do more damage to my eighth cranial nerve? There was a protocol for sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL), but it involved the use of corticosteroids injected directly into the cavity behind the eardrum. Another treatment involved taking a large dose of oral corticosteroids in an attempt to reduce swelling of the hearing nerve embedding inside my skull. After a few minutes of pleading, the doctor decided to combine the treatment into a glorious cocktail to recover hearing.
Another part of the audiogram I had ignored earlier, the SRT and speech discrimination, now also became very important. My right ear scored 5 dB for speech recognition threshold (SRT) while my left needed 45 dB to understand. Who knew the words hotdog, baseball, and cowboy could make the difference from hearing and deafness. Using amplification, my speech discrimination score was 100% in the right ear, but just 60% in the damaged left ear. I had mentioned to the doctor that my left ear was so broken, I may never gain its use. The corticosteroids regiment success or failure would teeter on whether I recovered my damaged hearing or could at least understand more words at amplification.