My Concussion: fixing my hearing

Shortly after I wrote my one year anniversary blog post, I began researching panic attacks after concussions. I was also missing words when listening to people talk, especially if there was background noise. As a result, I had a hard time concentrating and finding the right words when talking. No wonder it was so difficult to write! 

Finally, I found a great website for military personnel that detailed all the tests I should have had after being diagnosed with a concussion. It advised getting one's sight and hearing checked right away after a concussion. Why didn't the local hospital tell me that? I'm still rather irked that I wasted more than a year thinking I would never be able to lead a normal life again when all I really needed was to get my hearing checked.

I found a highly rated audiologist with a free two-hour evaluation and made an appointment. The audiologist sent me a video about the damage hearing loss does to a person's cognitive abilities. People with hearing problems have an increased risk of dementia due to lack of proper auditory stimulation, which leads to the degeneration of the auditory nerve. Hearing problems can also cause social isolation, depression, cognitive overload, memory problems, increased risk of falling and deteriorating  quality of life. I think I experienced everything on this list except depression.

I went into my appointment thinking that I had a noise sensitivity and would need ear filters. After going through multiple tests, I discovered that my problem was that I was hearing differently in each ear. In one ear, I had high frequency hearing loss and in the other ear I had low frequency hearing loss. This unusual condition is called asymmetric hearing loss. My poor brain had been trying to process different sounds from each ear and that's why I had cognitive overload and became overwhelmed in noisy crowded places. My uncorrected asymmetric hearing loss had caused my brain to abandon my previously existing auditory pathway and generate a new, inefficient auditory pathway, which overloaded easily.

So, I now have hearing aids in each ear. They will be gradually tuned so that my brain can catch up and reprogram itself. It will take six to eighteen months for my brain to be fully reprogrammed, but I am already hearing well enough to eat in noisy places without any problems. Some noises are still too loud, though. I can tune down the hearing aids a little bit, but sound reducing headphones work better.

I received my hearing aids May 15th and left for a two week trip to the UK on July 12th. On the whole, I did fine with loud noises--except when we visited what should be peaceful Kew Gardens, outside of London. I went there in 1976, found it quiet and fascinating, and was eager to show it to my family. Since then, Heathrow Airport added a new runway that has resulted in large, low-flying airplanes flying over the Gardens and nearby town of Kew, bringing almost constant disruptive noise along with them. Because I didn't bring my headphones with me that day, I didn't handle it very well. But without my hearing aids, it probably would have been a lot worse.

July 20, 2023 at Kew Gardens

Here is an interesting post about living under the flight-path of Heathrow Airport during the pandemic: https://hacan.org.uk/?p=78676