A lot has been going on in the last few weeks [or is it months?] since my last proper post. There have been some serious ups and downs, and I don’t quite know where to start.. So, I’ll just start with what’s on my mind right in this moment: my hearing. Or, rather, the lack thereof.

I’ve not really written about this before, because up until about a year ago, it’s not really been too much of an issue, or at least it has been an issue I have had the luxury of being able to ignore.

As my long standing friends will know I lost a big chunk of my hearing many many years ago, when I was about twenty. I was doing voluntary work at an orphanage in a village outside a village outside another village, in the Middle Of Nowhere, India. It was Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, and as a special treat for the children we had bought fireworks and penny crackers, which they were allowed to set off. All was going great, big bright smiles all around, lots of happy dancing and singing.

Until one of the kids threw a firecracker up in the air and it exploded right next to my left ear. My whole world went silent in an instant. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, that sudden and complete absence of sound. I remember screaming, but not being able to hear the sound of my own voice.

Over the next hours and days some hearing in my right ear did come back, but the hearing in my left ear was almost entirely gone. I managed to see a doctor when I went into town a few days later. He very carefully examined my ear and hearing and confirmed the damage with a simple “This is not good” and a slow, sad shake of his head.

And that’s pretty much how it’s been until recently. I knew I could probably be helped by wearing a hearing aid, but I simply wasn’t ready for it, and since I was able to use the remaining hearing in my right ear well enough to compensate for the loss in the left, I just left it at that. Something was broken, but not enough to bother fixing it.. There has been a lot of “If you want me to hear you, you’ll need to walk on my right – if you’re only going to talk rubbish, stay on the left” going on over the years, but all in all, through a combination of lip reading, context deduction and plain ol’ guesswork, I’ve been able to fake hearing pretty darn well. It’s amazing how easy it is to just laugh when everyone else laughs at the end of a joke you haven’t even heard, or to cover up giving the wrong answer to a question..

However, a bit over a year ago I started noticing that I was no longer as able to compensate with my ‘good’ ear as I used to be, and – being fifteen odd years older – I decided that it was kind of silly to routinely pretend being able to hear when I couldn’t, and that I should really do something about it. So, I went to have a test.

The results were shocking; not only was the hearing in my left ear really poor, my right ear was also significantly worse than I had thought. I was advised that I was a prime candidate for double hearing aids, and that I should get my GP to sort out a referral [private hearing aids are horrendously expensive].

A number of months later I was finally given an appointment at an NHS hospital. Only by the time I had that second round of hearing tests there had been a distinct further drop in my hearing, particularly in my right ear, and as this wasn’t normal I needed to be seen by an ENT specialist. The audiologist told me that this kind of drop could quite possibly be down to an acoustic neuroma – a fancy way of saying that I might have a brain tumour affecting my hearing. Consequently, an Urgent Referral to an ENT specialist was made. For those of you who don’t know, an Urgent Referral in NHS/ENT terms means ‘probably around three months’. Thus, I spent three months trying to not give myself cancer by worrying about this possible tumour, while not being able to hear what people were saying, since hearing aids can’t be issued while you are still under investigation.

The three months passed and I very nervously went for my appointment, having absolutely no idea what to expect. It turns out that in those three months since my last appointment a second drop in hearing had occurred. More bad news. On some level I kind of knew this, but I had talked myself into believing that the drop was ‘just in my head’, that it was simply down to a higher awareness of my hearing loss, having now stopped pretending to be able to hear when I can’t – but – the audiogram clearly showed that this was a genuine drop, and not something I had imagined.

The ENT specialist sat me down and took an extremely detailed medical history, after which he concluded that it was exceedingly unlikely to be an acoustic neuroma, as only 13 people in 1,000,000 have them, and that my sudden sensorineural hearing loss [SSNHL] was far more likely to have been caused by my two most recent overdoses, as the drops follow that pattern precisely, and the chemical I had taken is well known to cause hearing loss in those who survive the overdose.

Needless to say, to me, this was quite a powerful emotional bombshell. I had been medically cleared after those overdoses and there had seemed to be no lasting damage.. But, clearly, this was not so, and I was now seeing the consequences of my actions in black and white.

The ENT person said that it was possible that the SSNHL might not be permanent, and that a short, high dose, course of steroids might jump start some hearing cells in my ear, partially reversing some of the loss. Ideally this kind of treatment is given within days of the hearing loss occurring, rather than months later, so it was in no way certain that the treatment would work, but he felt that it was definitely worth giving it a go, because whilst there wasn’t really anything to be done about the hearing loss caused by the initial blast trauma, there was still a slim chance that the more recent drop could be helped. I’d still need hearing aids, he told me, but I might be able to avoid cochlear implants further down the line.

I’m going to end this update here, simply because this is already a massively long post, but, I will write more about what happened with the steroid treatment and my hearing in the next few days.

I feel very aware that I haven’t really talked about the emotional impact of not being able to hear, or the fact that part of my hearing loss may have been caused by my own actions, and I hope that I will be able to touch more on that in the second part of this saga, because – of course – this is a big deal.

Until then, do be kind to your Selfs.

xx

PS. I’ve yet to sort my PC out, so I do apologise if the formatting of this post is a bit rubbish; it was all typed on an iDevice, and that’s a lot fiddlier than one might imagine..