Huh?

Eva
HOORAY! Keep it up, girl!

BBB

YAY!! Excellent news!

That is really good news!

Great! Thanks for the update!!

Have you gotten any numbers, yet? Actual db loss?

Pleased here!

Pleased here.

Wow! Thanks, everyone! This is going to be a long haul, but at least it's headed in the right direction. That does make a big difference.

No, Soz, I haven't managed to get that information yet. Still trying. I have been told the loss is in the midtones (voices, music, etc.) which I already knew. And that is fortunate, according to what my doctor told me today, because if it were the high tones or very low tones, that is much harder to recover. Can they tell me what the db loss is without knowing where I was before the accident? I've never had a scan run before this happened, so I don't have baseline figures.

The db loss isn't relative to what your hearing was -- it's just the current audiogram.

Here, I found a sample audiogram for ya:



"Frequency in Hertz" refers to high or low tones. To the left is low (250 hertz is very low), to the right is high (8000 hertz is very high). "Intensity in Decibels" refers to how loud the sound is. Softer sounds are up (1 decibel is very soft), louder sounds are down (100 decibels is very loud.)

The yellow thing is the "speech banana" that I referred to before -- it is where most usable speech sounds are. More on that in a minute.

The person whose hearing is being charted on this audiogram has different losses in her (we'll say) two ears. One ear, we'll say the left, is represented by the blue x, and can process low tones quite well, (low frequencies), but the high tones drop way down.

In other words, a very low tone that is relatively quiet -- only about 7 decibels -- can be heard. But a high tone that is quite loud -- 80 decibels -- can't be heard.

This kind of variation happens fairly often, especially in terms of hearing low tones but not high tones.

For what we will call the right ear, represented by the red circle, the sounds that are being effectively processed are different. There is less variation, hovering around 60-80 decibels no matter what the tone is. (Again, that means that the first time a sound can be processed it needs to be 60-80 decibels, or quite loud.)

Back to the speech banana: Most of the sounds that separate language into comprehensible parts are found in this range. This particular audiogram is cool because it identifies some of the specific sounds -- "M"s are lower, "s"s, "f's" and "th"s are higher. (I remember having a terrible time hearing my own "s"s at the beginning of my hearing loss.)

The thing about the speech banana is that even while a a 30-40 db loss isn't bad -- it's a fair amount of hearing -- it puts you right smack dab in the area where it's hard to get enough info to make spoken language comprehensible. That's where hearing aids can be enormously useful, even if the db loss isn't that bad.

Hope that helps a bit! :-) Let me know if anything isn't clear (I know it's confusing.)

Thank you. Once I get my chart - my exam confirmed my estimation, but I didn't nab a record - I'll look at this with your eyes. Have seen a otologist yet, busy, eh, with other stuff, but I have just taken out a line of credit and may go for hearing aids. Yes, I'll run my data by you before I buy in any case. No hurry, I have been saying what for a while. My eye surgeon of the not so long ago emergency, the very high end one, thought I might have Usher's (or something like that) syndrome, a clingon with retinitis pigmentosa + hearing loss.

Who knows, for me it might as well have been the time I was hit by a flying basketball, and had a headache for a few days (but at the time laughed it off, after I sat up.) Or none of the above, it might be normal for rock and roll and jazz listeners of my time, though I don't think that I was at the extreme of that.

I have ear whistles and say 'what' a lot, don't hear high tones or low mumbles. It really gets in the way, as you know, Soz.

To recapituate, thank you for the chart.

Yes, thanks for the explanation, soz! I'll have to read it through a couple of times to get it down, but it's very helpful.

The specialist's office didn't send my regular doctor the data...just a written report, which didn't give specific figures. So now I will call the specialist's office and ask them to fax the audiogram data & charts directly to me.

Again, thanks a million!

Great!

Again, you can ask specific questions and I'll do my best to answer -- sometimes that helps to make sense of a big chunk of information. This is definitely one of those things that seems simple when it's in my head, and then when I start to explain it I realize that it's actually quite complicated.

One thing I didn't really go into enough I don't think is how those X's and O's get there. Basically, when you have an audiogram done, a series of tones are played of varying frequency and loudness (hertz and decibels) and you indicate whether you hear them. The marks on the audiogram are the last time you indicate you can hear a tone. So, you can hear that tone if it's louder than the mark -- you can't hear it if it is quieter than the mark. The mark shows the boundary.

Yes, you're right. I am brand new to this, so naturally it seems complicated. Anything you're used to doing seems simple. Even when it's not. I bet if I started talking about magazine formatting, it would take you awhile to catch on. Don't worry...I've never been afraid to ask questions. I'll figure it out...thanks so much for helping me.

I went back for a second audiogram yesterday, and I'm still improving! HOORAY!

Soz...you can plot the following info, right?
Here's six weeks ago (4/27)...

Frequency...Right Ear/Left Ear
250 hz...40db/30db
500 hz...50db/35db
1000 hz...58db/55db
2000 hz...42db/50db
3000 hz...30db/28db
4000 hz...30db/30db
6000 hz...30db/50db
8000 hz...25db/25db

Here's yesterday (6/8):

Frequency...Right Ear/Left Ear
250 hz...25db/25db
500 hz...35db/35db
1000 hz...45db/45db
2000 hz...35db/40db
3000 hz...25db/25db
4000 hz...25db/30db
6000 hz...25db/25db
8000 hz...25db/25db

I can understand speech just fine as long as someone is facing me and there's no background noise. But voices still sound metallic...with feedback...like they're at the end of a long tunnel. And loud noises are extremely uncomfortable. Doctor says it's good progress, to keep taking niacin & hearing pill, and adding vitamins A & E couldn't hurt. They're going to run a couple more tests next week...one for fluid pressure, and another I didn't understand. Will find out more then.

I'm so glad to hear your good news, Eva!

Eva
Just keep heading the good progress direction, girl!

Its almost like going to Weight Watchers and weighing in every week to track the number of pounds you are losing. Except its your ears that are gaining normal function.

BBB

I'm delighted for the positive change too, Eva!

Thanks, everyone!

(Funny you should mention WW, BBB...I've been on the South Beach diet for a month now, and have lost the weight I put on during the initial steroid therapy...and then some!)

That's cool, Eva!

Have you talked about hearing aids at all yet? I'm curious about why, if not. The hearing loss is still in the speech banana, and you would be helped tremendously by hearing aids.

Perhaps the docs are waiting to see how much more improvement there is?

The lack of low tones gives that metallic sound -- I think of low tones as giving depth, rounding things out. (The highest numbers are in the lower range -- that means a noise has to be pretty loud before you can hear it.)

I can actually plot it all over the graph above if you'd like...

Thanks, soz, but I have the audiograms now. They said we wouldn't talk about hearing aids until the hearing stabilizes, and we'd see if I need them then.

The questions I DIDN'T get answered from them are...What's normal? Where was I before this happened? How much more progress do I have to make before I'm hearing regularly? (I know they can't tell me if or when that will happen, but I can't tell how far off normal I am.)