Comment by DavidPiper
7 months ago
"If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side."
This is personal experience, but it is the personal experience of my specialist telling me. [1] is some less anecdotal information on the subject. My use of the term "game over" was specifically for audible speech interpretation.
Lip reading is indeed something I'll probably need to get better at into my mid-30s and beyond as things continue to degrade. My hearing loss is low-frequency-first (Meniere's Disease [2]).
[1] https://www.cochlear.com/au/en/home/diagnosis-and-treatment/...
[2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/menieres-dise...
I was diagnosed with "glue ear" as a young child, which I don't think any doctor admits to these days! I had two lots of grommet related operations which involved inserting tiny plastic hollow cylinders into my eustachian tubes, to try and widen them. After a couple of years they were removed by a doctor with a sort of hooked probe. So two lots of treatment spanning around six years. That was in the seventies.
I remember being put into a sound proof booth and wearing headphones and being played pure tones from a generator and being told to press a button when I heard the tones. With hindsight, tinnitus would have played merry hell with those tests, especially at the frequencies they seemed to concentrate on. Yes, my memory is fine!
Did the treatment help? Probably not. I recall what the sounds of tinnitus were as a very young child and they are same now.
Since around aged 45 (I'm 53 now) I have experienced brief spinning/dizzy spells. I find them quite easy to counter. I first noticed them whilst wearing skis which was a bit disconcerting.
Having read up on your link to "Meniere's Disease" - that's probably what I ... have, for want of a better word. However, the dizzy spells for me are transitory and not certainly not minutes or hours.
I gave up smoking around six years ago after 30 odd years tabbing. That probably doesn't help either.
My point is that your faculties are very complicated and the science is somewhat lacking. Putting a name to a basket of symptoms may not even be helpful in our case. I am a (was) a really good swimmer but diving below around two metres deep used to really hurt unless I gently worked down and popped my ears.
In the end I think I have mild symptoms compared to many but I don't have many people to compare notes with. What becomes normal over years and decades hides a lot of things.
Based on my personal experience, you will automatically get better at lip reading or deducing what is going on via body language etc. I also have to wear glasses ...
Anyway, I wish you all the best and hope you find a way to live with whatever conditions you have. We have a surprisingly impressive array of sensors and back end processing gear. The eyes are amazing in being able to scan a scene with a tiny aperture and the brain to stitch together a very accurate scenario of what is where and doing what. Touch and all the rest are available, all the time. The next time you catch a ball, pick up a pen, kiss the missus/husband or whatever, remind yourself of how amazing that is, and you are.