"Huh?!"

If you have been around me for longer than 5 minutes, you will probably think "Huh?!" is one of my favorite words...for the record, it is not! I found out today that I am not a complete moron, I am truly deaf! After years of making people repeat everything they say sometimes 3 times or more, I finally broke down and went to the doctor... I went to visit the audiologist today where they put me in this super small room and hooked me up to these ear buds and made sounds and talked into my ears at different times, on different sides which took about 15 minutes. Come to find out, I have hearing loss in both ears! In my left ear, I can hear but cannot understand what you say no matter how loud it is said, only muffled noise. The doctor expressed concern that my hearing loss is not symmetrical in the fact that I cannot hear 100% out of either ear but the left is much worse than the right. So, he decided to do a test called an ABR (no clue what that stands for) where they hook these electrode things up to my head and behind my ears and make these super crazy noises in my ears to see what my brain waves were doing.

I couldn't help taking a crazy picture!

So this ABR test was inconclusive and did not show exactly what was causing the problem. I am not sure if this meant I did not have brain waves... lol! So now I have to go for an MRI next week to see what may be causing the problem. The doc is afraid that I may have a tumor blocking the nerves which may be disrupting the sound waves. If this is the case, the tumor would have to be removed even though it would most definitely be benign, it could cause problems with other things further down the road.

The Anatomy of the Ear

Just for an anatomy lesson, the little snail shaped thing in the middle is the cochlea (which makes you hear) the blue part in the middle are the nerves which make the sounds, where the sound goes in is where the high pitched sounds are processed and as it gets closer to the middle of the snail part that is the low pitched sounds. So this could be damaged from just nerve damage, born that way, genetic stuff, etc.  And then the little yellow nerves on the top-right of the picture are what he is worried may be blocked which would not allow sounds to process correctly. 

So, in conclusion, if it is not a tumor, it is not fixable so I will be saying "Huh?!" a lot! Probably followed by a "do what?!", "hmm?!", and a "one more time..." and if I still don't get it, just text it to me! Ha! I will also have to do everything possible to preserve my "good" ear so no scuba diving, gun shooting, or lawn mowing for me in the future! I will keep you posted on the results!

And we now now why I haven't been to the doctor until now...