On November 25, 2017, at four o'clock in the afternoon, I heard a knock at the door. I stood up from my desk and as I walked to the door, felt my ear was blocked. That was the last day I was a normal hearing person.
Sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL, or sudden deafness) requires urgent medical treatment. It is a reduction in the ability to hear that comes on suddenly or rapidly over a few days. SSNHL occurs due to a problem with the inner ear and most commonly affects one side.
It is estimated that 10 to 80 per 100,000 people per year are affected by SSNHL. It is more common in people in their 40s and 50s. The cause is often never found, but it can occur due to infection, autoimmune disease, blood circulation problems, medications such as some chemotherapy agents, or a tumour on the balance nerve. SSNHL can occur following COVID-19 and may be the only symptom of it, affecting teenagers and young adults as well.
The first thing that many people notice is partial or complete loss of hearing in one ear when they wake up in the morning. Some find that their ear suddenly feels blocked, or they are unable to hear their phone on that side. They may also have ringing (tinnitus) or a sensation of fullness in the affected ear, or vertigo (a sensation that the environment is moving around you or you around it).
As a professional communications specialist, my work was instantly impacted. How could I help organisations with their communication when I couldn’t hear how their people communicated? -Marianna Pascal
Fast forward through the depressing digesting of what life with Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss feels like, I knew a hearing aid was my only hope of regaining the ability to hear people, and to regain some of the cognitive skills that I had lost with my brain defaulting to one ear to hear.
SSNHL is diagnosed with a hearing test and treated by an ENT surgeon. Steroids are usually administered, either orally or as an injection through the eardrum, or both. Steroids are generally only of benefit if they are started within a month of the onset of symptoms. Visit an ENT or Audiologist as soon as you notice the symptoms as it is vital for the condition to be diagnosed and for the treatment to commence immediately says Dr Rebecca Heywood, Senior consultant ENT Surgeon from Advanced ENT Centre at Gleneagles Medical Centre. Unfortunately, many people initially attribute their symptoms to wax or water in the ear or blocked ears related to nose/sinus symptoms. Alternatively, they may think that they are unable to hear because of the ringing noise in their ear. By the time they seek medical treatment it may be too late to treat the condition effectively.
Hearing loss in one ear can lead to significant disability and impair a person’s quality of life. They may not be able to understand what is being said to them in environments such as open plan offices, boardrooms and restaurants. Rehabilitation options include conventional hearing aids, CROS hearing aid, bone conduction devices and cochlear implants. A cochlear implant is an electronic device that can restore the perception of sound and has revolutionised our ability to treat severe to profound hearing loss.
My first experience with an audiologist was in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. After a 20-minute hearing test, the audiologist prescribed a hearing aid, and sent me out to the world to test it. Sounds were loud, tinny, and unbearable. I knew this audiologist was not the one for me.
My second experience with an audiologist was in Singapore. After a hearing test, they prescribed a latest-model hearing aid. After an hour of testing it in the shopping mall outside, I returned and told them that the world through this aid sounded aggressively loud. Every clang of dishes, honk of horns, slam of doors was painful and entirely overshadowed the sound of voices, which were all that I really wanted to hear. They told me I’d get used to it over time and asked how I wanted to pay.
Audiologist number three was again in Singapore. Over three visits to this audiology center, each time a different audiologist saw me. Each had a different opinion, prescribed a different aid with different settings and at a considerable cost, send me home to test each one. One suggested that I have two hearing aids, another suggested a bone conduction aid. The audiologists felt as frustrated as I did.
I became more depressed with every audiologist until finally, a surgeon friend recommended Deepak D’Souza ,Senior Principal Audiologist from D&S Audiology.
Visiting D&S Audiology, the centre that Deepak runs with his associate Dr Sen Kee, was entirely different experience from the start. I was thoroughly assessed, and the hearing aid tests were more extensive, and involved voice recognition tests, some with background noise, some without. Also, unlike all the other audiologists, the Audiologists at D&S Audiology were able to measure the difference between my ability to understand words with and without the aid, and so were able to show me concrete evidence that the hearing aid was helping me to understand voices.
Over three separate appointments with testing at home with a loaner hearing aid, Deepak listened carefully to my feedback and kept finetuning the settings with great patience. I remember the moment when Deepak guided me to stream a podcast directly into my hearing aid, and for the first time in seven years, I could understand words that were streamed directly into my deaf ear. I cried in his office from joy!
I now wear a hearing aid in my left ear that makes the surrounding sounds feel comfortable. The aid does not restore my hearing fully, but it does amplify voices so that I no longer needed to cup my ear and turn my head when listening to people in public places. The greatest joy of all is to feel a sense of balance that I am listening through both ears. I feel my brain beginning to work the way that it should, and my cognitive skills beginning to improve.
Any audiologist can sell a great hearing aid. But a hearing aid is only as effective as the audiologist who programs it for the individual’s unique ear. The care and time taken at D&S Audiology was the key to producing the outcome I really needed: to begin to restore the quality of life that I have been missing for seven years!
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