ear infection

I approve of beet and sweet potato chips.

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get better, all you unwell people

Going to care for tiny tot who has had a fever and diarrhea all weekend and who just through up. Wish me luck.

Oh man, just what you need! Good luck (consider getting a surgical mask).

I wish you luck, and the protection of the Purelle gods....

What she said!!!!

Thanks all. He threw up on me. yay. The thing is his mother decided to stay home AFTER he had already thrown up on me. So, there I was a useless artifact being thrown up on. I decided to stay until it was time to get his sister so they didn't have to go to the school.

that, while not surprising in the least, given the track record, still sucks.

Yeah.

Notes for myself:

I had my follow-up appointments with the ENT department at my doctor complex. No signs of infection and the blrpblrgblp I still sometimes hear when I lean over is due to negative pressure in my ear. Dunno how that happens. They also did a hearing test and it seems that my hearing has gotten worse in the last 15 years. I guess that's not that surprising. This was the most comprehensive test I've had yet. My hearing range graph is an s-curve.

My low-tone hearing sucks shows signs of moderate loss in both ears. There's a jump in hearing capacity between 1000 and 2500 hertz frequencies and my upper range hearing sort of levels out there. My range is good in the frequencies that spoken language is registered in, but I hear the hard sounds (k, ch, p, th sh, etc) better than the soft sounds (j, m, n, vowels, etc). I called the latter grouping the mumble sounds. You can actually spell m-u-m-b-l-e- with the letters there. Fascinating chart.

Hearing aids won't likely help due to the range of hearing loss (they help with speaking frequencies). But, I got a handy-dandy list of communication strategies that I already have incorporated into my life. Or at least have tried to. Many depend on the actions of those speaking with me.

My audiogram looks a lot like the one to the left in the image below. My low range is around 60 db loss and my high range is between 5 and 20.

I hope you have good health insurance... :wink:

Hey littlek,



I'm not sure if it's the only way, but one way I know that happens is when fluid leaves the ear. It happened to sozlet before, then the pressure normalized after a while (nothing specific was done).



How did you come to that conclusion? There are hearing aids that can deal with wide ranges (as far as I know, all of them), and your loss is right in the speech banana.



That means you're a prime candidate for hearing aids.

The banana is where most human speech sounds occur.

I can certainly give you some communication tips too if you're interested.

How ya doin'? Are you glad you know more about what's up with your ears? Is it scary? All of the above?

Perhaps a visit to the MGH is in order.

Miller are you at MGH?

Soz, my hearing loss is in the low tones, my high tone range is normal. The hearing aids a re better for high tones. So they said.

Hmm. Who's "they"?

I know far less about low-tone loss than high-tone loss (I had the latter, when I was hard-of-hearing), but that really seems like the db range where hearing aids help a lot.

They is the audiologist and the ENT. My high range is above the banana (upper right) and my low range is below the banana (lower left).

It's the below-the-banana part that I think can be helped. Get it back up IN the banana.

Audiologist and ENT though... seems weird to me but those are the people who would know.

I think hearing aids are designed to help people hear other people. My hearing loss is mostly below the range of speech. I can't hear a dog growl, for example.

and you can sleep well.... no trucks and city hums to disturb you.

Yes! But then, nothing disturbs me when I sleep.

Ok, here's my ears. As it says, Xs are the left ear and Os are the right ear. It's nice and big so you can see the little pictures. I'm not sure what the little pictures represent (except for the spoken phonemes).