At the time, my ENT told me that immediate treatment with steroids had a 30% success rate, but ONLY if the person didn’t lose their balance system at the same time. The success rate if you HAD lost your balance system was only 10%.
Also, after reading your linked article, the 60% result was only with 1 small study.
I did undergo the steroid treatment, but it didn’t help me.
J.
Something else I wanted to add. Sudden Hearing Loss usually has no other symptoms. It is not associated with pain, and if you have pain it isn’t Sudden Hearing Loss. The only other symptom associated with Sudden Hearing Loss is that in the days, weeks, or months prior, you may experience minor glitches in your hearing. E.g. a “plugged ear”-like feeling that lasts a short time, a drop in hearing level that lasts a short time, etc.
Often the Sudden Hearing Loss is the first symptom.
J.
I might as well piggyback on this OP (begging OP’s pardon), but you can also ask me,
The Guy Who Didn’t Lose His Hearing But Has Ataxia, in Which All Sense of Orientation is Removed Due to a Brain Anomaly
(and during an attack you clutch the Earth for dear life not knowing if gravity will pull you to the sky, and for months you can’t even move)
I have lost total hearing in my left ear twice now and it came back a few days later. No other symptoms. I am thinking I should talk to my Dr.
I’m almost completely deaf in my left ear and have a constant ringing in that ear. Lately I have had periods of dizziness and have fallen several times. I live alone and have been forced to call friends and relatives to get me on my feet. No jokes about the “I can’t get up” commercial. It’s not a joke.
I’m told that I have situational vertigo and have had to begin using a walker again rather than a cane. And these are the golden years???
Hi
In April this year I had sudden hearing loss in my left ear, and lost my balance.
I was referred urgently for a scan, and had hearing tests. I was given cinnarizine.
My hearing improved slightly after 3 weeks, but I now have tinnitus and I’m still suffering from vertigo, although not quite as bad, this is eight weeks later. My tests showed nothing, no virus detected n my blood tests either.
Do you guys think I will have to live with this, or is there anything I can do?
Thanks
All of this sounds familiar. As to whether you will have to live with this, the answer (at least in my case) is yes and no. You will have to live with this right now, but you can rebuild your balance system.
In my case, walking really helped. Start out slowly. Just walk to the corner and back. If you need to, carry a cane. I carried one for my first week walking, but I never had to use it. After a couple of days, walk to the next corner and back. Every couple of days, increase your distance. If you can, do these several times a day. Also, learn what works FOR YOU. Maybe walking really slowly helps. Maybe having your head turned to the left or right. Maybe wearing an Ipod.
As you begin to improve, try to add more motions in. Try to look around at the houses on the left and right sides of the street. Look up at the trees. Look down at the cracks in the sidewalk.
Push yourself a LITTLE, but don’t push yourself too hard. You’re going to have good days and bad days. My recovery was no where near a straight line up. On really bad days, I’d do less, but I’d still try to do a little.
Another suggestion: if you have health insurance that covers it, try to get “Balance Therapy”. While I found walking more helpful, Balance Therapy also helped some. In it, they give you exercises in moving your head and eyes, and also exercises in leaning your body this way and that.
It DOES get better, although never quickly enough. After 4 years, now, my balance system is mostly normal. I won’t ever go on a roller coaster again, because I know that would wipe me out. But I have been zip-lining twice in the last year, without any problems. And I don’t have any day-to-day problems with dizziness or my balance.
As for the tinnitus, the really strange tinnitus of the first couple of months settled down into a steady ringing that I can mostly ignore.
Good luck to you. Keep your spirits up. It DOES get better!
J.
wow!
Thanks J for your great reply. I have been feeling down, but I’ll do as you say, and slowly get back to normal hopefully. Only people who have these problems truly understand. The doctors just prescribe drugs.
I’m back at the docs, so will be asking about any therapy sessions they run.
Thanks for taking the time to suggest these things.
Take care
Steve
Would you ever be considered a candidate for cochlear implants?
I haven’t heard anything about these. Is it common to use them, or are they a last resort?
It’s amazing how most people can live their entire lives taking balance for granted. I mean sure we all have brief experiences with dizziness and such from time to time, so it’s not completely unimaginable… but I can’t really fathom what it would be like to have to rebuild my entire sense of balance back from the ground up after such an event. Very crazy stuff. Thank you for sharing your experience.
Here’s the story I get from my ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor):
Health insurance won’t pay for a cochlear implant for single-sided deafness. If you lose hearing in your good ear (i.e., go completely deaf), then health insurance WILL pay for cochlear implants.
My impression about cochlear implants (which, admittedly, is naive and not that well informed) is that cochlear implants are a poor substitute for “real” hearing. On the other hand, they are a LOT better than having no hearing at all.
So I haven’t really researched having this done yet. Also, my ENT said it wasn’t necessary while I still have decent one-sided hearing.
J.
I’ve thought of 1 or 2 other things about my recovery that you might experience.
I noticed when I first started walking (as therapy) that the visual background would “jump” a little at each step. This is something we don’t normally notice because our brains automatically take care of this – until you lose your balance system.
Remember that the official name of your balance system is the “visual-vestibular system”. The visual aspect plays a MAJOR role in your balance. When I first lost this system, I found that I couldn’t walk in the dark. If I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t keep my balance at all and had to revert to holding myself up with my hands. (I considered it a major step forward in my recovery when I found I WAS able to walk in the dark again.)
Getting back to the visual background jumping: every step you take raises and lowers your head slightly, and also moves it side to side a little. Normally, your brain takes care of this and constructs a representation where the visual background doesn’t move significantly as you walk. Part of losing my balance system was the loss of this brain ability. So when I would walk, the background would jump a little with every step. With me, I found if I paid too much attention to this happening, I would just get dizzier. It helped me not get dizzy if I didn’t try to focus on the background. Just letting my eyes casually wander without straining to focus on anything seemed to work for me.
On a different aspect of the problem, see my reply #15 about turning on my right side. I went for too many months avoiding this position and ended up with an awful 2 months trying to fix it. After you’re feeling a little better and feel that you are recovering, consider intentionally putting yourself into any trigger position you have once in a while: maybe take one day a week and dedicate it to re-acclimating yourself to that position. I’m hoping that if you can start the process of re-acclimating yourself early, you won’t have to go through the 2 months of torture that it took me to fix it.
Also, however, before you do this, have your ENT check you for “Benign Positional Vertigo”. Benign Positional Vertigo also commonly happens in sudden hearing loss cases, though not in my case. (Which is why we concluded that I just wasn’t acclimated to the laying on my right side position.) BPV is when a crystal in your inner ear gets out of place, or misaligned. Your ENT can correct BPV by quickly moving your head into a specific position that realigns these crystals.
A disadvantage of the BPV test is that it will probably make you really dizzy. I made an agreement with my ENT that I would do the BPV test, if she agreed to also do the BPV treatment in the same visit, if she found I had BPV. I wanted to have only 1 day of feeling awful, rather than 2 different days.
Anyway, I’ve rambled on long enough. Feel free to ask any other questions you have.
J.
Hi J,
I do have the jumping background as you mentioned. Every step is a big wobble. They are referring me to a tinnitus clinic next to try to sort out the sensitivity to sound. Hope this will help. I think I need a hearing aid, as my hearing is so bad still. Thanks for your help.
Hi everyone from a sunny/stormy London.
I am a 26 year old male and have had similar experiences to those mentioned.
When I was 18/19 I suffered extreme vertigo which would case me to be sick, extreme headaches and to be bed-bound for days at a time.
When I was 19 I had a very heavy cold. One morning I woke up and I couldn’t hear in my left ear. My cold cleared but I still couldn’t hear. It’s still the same today and feels blocked. Some specialists have said it’s related to the Meniere’s a suffer from but I think it’s viral and unrelated in my personal but unqualified opionion.
I have a question for other members who suffer from deafness in one ear. If you do very rigourous exercise, do you ever feel the liquid (or what feels like liquid) move around in your bad ear, and loud squelching etc? May sound like a weird question but even to this day (7 years later) I’m hopeful something will maybe unblock!
My meniere’s has subsided mostly, touch wood - I do still get headaches sometimes though and like others I think, hate pressure against the back of my neck and feel dizzy looking upwards for a long period of time etc.
When I’m with others, I have to make sure they’re on my right hand side otherwise I cannot hear them.
Extremely interested to hear from anyone, especially regarding the exercise part and moving fluid…
Cheers!
VSZ999