For Ozdobe

[meecie]

I'm still trying to keep up with reading, even when I can't sort things out to comment all that often. But I figured this deserved a post.

ozdobe, I hope you get your hearing back in your left ear soon, but in case you don't, so you don't feel so alone, let me tell you a few perks you might have not realized yet. I lost hearing in my right ear over 20

Comments

[ozdobe]

Thank you. I have started doing a few of these things. A hearing aid won't help since it is the inner ear and not the eardrum - the nerve has been affected somehow.

With Lana being sick, I had to make sure to sleep with the good ear up or I couldn't hear her whining to get let out (every 2 hours in the end). I worry that I won't hear the things that wake me up that I need to hear. Out here in the rural Oregon countryside, not so much noise that you don't want to hear.

But all the other things in the list are pluses!

Thank you for taking the time to give me some pointers.

[meecie]

More than pointers, I wanted to have you feel less alone.

I've heard of the sudden nerve deafness, but didn't want to assume that's what you had - mine was actually a benign, but fast-growing tumor in my middle ear space. So some the same, some different.

You will still wake up. And/or your dogs will learn to poke you awake (Jodah does this).

And I'm sorry again that it happened.

[nosemovie]

Razor pokes me awake... and I can hear JUST FINE>. .friggin dogs.

[meecie]

Oh, another thing I thought of, that really only a fellow dog person would get.

Once I lost my hearing on one side (and as it varies, really), I started having a lot of trouble telling where sounds were coming from. Left? Right? Up? To some degree, this got better and better as I got used to it (I figure my brain was re-wiring itself). But I was also all "hey, wait, I'm a DOG person, I should totally train my dogs to help me out with the most common stuff." So yeah, Jodah will usually go find my phone when it rings for me now, which is terribly useful. I'm sure there are other things too.

[penichops]

Pan sleeps with her missing-eye-side up so that it is dark, I never thought about that with deafness though! Clever. One side of my hearing suddenly plummeted in capacity and also does this weird thing where it goes like water is in it when I hear certain noises, like close dogs barking and people talking in the car.
Specialist couldn't find anything.

Anyway I'm sure you get sick of people telling you about their ear complaints but I do find hearing interesting. Actually now I think about it I think I've told you this story before. But I didn't know you had a tumour in that ear. Geez

[ozdobe]

There is the outer ear with the eardrum (mine is fine), there is the inner ear with the cochlea (mine is fine), there is the nerve that conducts the messages to the brain (mine is likely fried and may or may not recover) and then there is the brain that interprets the nerve messages (mine seems fine since it transmits tinnitus and ringing and noise shared with the right ear. That's how I have analysed it - it's the nerve and that can't be helped at all - it is not structural to be fixed.

I am sorry you have intermittent trouble too. Mine feels like I just jumped in a pool and the outer ear is full of water, but I can't clear it.