Has anybody experienced sudden hearing loss from one ear?

[valis]

Has the hearing returned? What did the doctor tell you? A friend of mine has experienced that. It's not an infection. It's not a tumor. They don't know what it is, but they know it happens and it's permanent.

[ewagner]

1. Happened to me about 10 years ago..

no the hearing never came back. In my case it was probably because of a head injury during a fall on the ice...three years before the hearing loss.

[valis]

3. Wow. 3 years AFTER the fall you had the problem? Was it gradual?

Just curious, because even the specialists know very little about it... I could not believe it.

[ewagner]

7. Started abotu 6 months

after the fall....ear started ringing ever so slightly....got worse and worse and eventually no hearing at all....totally gone but the damned ringing is still there....

[trotsky]

8. My sympathies, ewagner.

I note my experience below, which was thankfully temporary, but even that length of time drove me batty with the constant ringing.

[trotsky]

2. Had your friend been taking any medication?

That's how Limpbutt lost his hearing, though he was abusing Oxycontin.

[valis]

4. Right.... I remember... My friend lost mostly low fequencies...

She can still hear the mid-high freqs well, and speech understanding is pretty normal. But when you test with pure tones, the low freqs in one ear are gone...

[trotsky]

6. I had a weird experience with one ear a couple of years ago.

You know that when you hear that brief (15-30 seconds, usually) ringing, it's one of your sensory "hairs" in the ear signing off, right? That's part of normal hearing loss as we age.

Well, I had a "hair" sign off but the ringing didn't stop. It wasn't loud, in fact in a room with a reasonable amount of noise I couldn't hear it.

But one really odd side effect was that it blocked a narrow range of frequencies - sort of in the middle-high range. It was most noticeable when I picked up my phone at work, which used a different higher-pitched dial tone. It sounded *different* to my ringing ear than it did to my normal one.

It took a couple of weeks but it did eventually pass and I've been fine since. Even had a few more hairs sign off normally. :shrug:

[valis]

9. Right, it's called "tinnitus"... She has it too...

It usually comes with this type of hearing loss (and other too)... Frustrating there isn't any good research on this... Also, the vast majority of health plans don't cover hearing aids... These can go for 2k a pop, and need to be replaced avery few years... Fucking scam...

[leftofthedial]

5. huh?

[Catchawave]

10. Could be ear wax buildup....?

But I'm guessing your "friend" is too young to experience such a middle-aged malady :)

Was it after a shower or swimming in deep water? Water in the ear/combined with wax will definitely plug that side of your head.

First time it happened to me, I was panicked, but a quick trip to a walk-in clinic (or Doc-in-the-box, depending on your area), was a quick ear flush with peroxide and a little wire loopy thing to drag the frog turd out of my head!

I'm a little confused "he" went to a doctor and they threw up their arms...surely they sent "him" to an ENT for further study?

Thoughts are with you and your "friend".

[valis]

13. Thanks... Wax buildup is what she believed she had...

But then she went to her PCP and there was no wax... Specialists (otologists, neurootologists) have done all the exams etc, and concluded it's some form of sensoryneural hearing loss (she did MRIs, of course, to rule out the presence of tumors etc)... Basically they put her on a cortison regime for 2 weeks (that sometimes works in these cases, they think it reduce inflammation in the inner ear), but they don't know what this syndrome is due to... Since it happens with a frequency of 1/10000 people, I thought somebody here may have experienced it... Thanks...

[sundog]

11. yes, but my ears are already fukt from my dj & club years

meh... I get by though :7

[DS1]

12. Yeah, too much wax

Clean it out