Sudden Hearing Loss Can Happen to Anyone

Even with a medical background, a nurse wasn’t aware that sudden hearing loss is considered a health emergency and should be treated immediately—and has vowed to share her experience to help others.

By Victoria Jordan, R.N.

There are a lot of memories made in your 20s. Two that stand out for me were starting my nursing career and losing my hearing. Never thought I’d see those two things happen in the same decade.

I remember the day I lost my hearing. It was an afternoon in September 2019. My sister and I went for a walk with the dogs before my night shift. After a short 20-minute stroll, I walked inside to get dressed for work when I noticed my left ear felt clogged. You know that feeling of intense pressure right before your ears pop after an airplane lands? That’s what it felt like, only the pressure wasn’t going away, and my ear wasn’t popping.

Maybe it’s just a bad headache from lack of sleep, I thought, since I was rotating between day and night shifts at the time and wasn’t sleeping well. Could be an ear infection—though I couldn’t think of a reason an ear infection would happen that aggressively and that quickly. Sudden hearing loss was not a thought that crossed my mind. I had never heard of such a thing, even as a nurse.

The author brings awareness to hearing loss through social media.

I arrived at work that evening and was ready to take notes about my patients. My colleague was sitting to my left, next to my clogged ear. When she started talking, I noticed how muffled her words sounded—like she was talking into styrofoam or underwater. She was also competing with a lot of noise that normally wouldn’t bother me, but for some reason, the noise sounded louder than usual. It was very distracting—painful, almost—the monitors beeping and babies crying. (I worked in a neonatal intensive care unit at the time.)

I turned my chair the other way so my right ear was toward her instead, and thankfully I was able to hear. So I finished writing my notes, then checked on my patients. At this point, my clogged ear was downright annoying. Nothing I did made it better, but at least nothing was making it worse. Or so I thought.

I walked into the room of my first patient, a tiny 2-month-old infant swaddled in a dinosaur blanket. When I unswaddled him to perform my assessment, he let out a cry that I can still feel to this day, four years later. The cry pinballed its way through every cell of my brain. The pressure in my head was so intense that I thought it was going to explode.

What the heck is going on?

That was one of the worst shifts of my career. I took some Advil before the drive home the next morning since my “headache” never went away. I’m sure once I get a few hours of sleep everything will be fine.

I woke up in the afternoon relieved that my head felt much better, and checked to see if the hearing in my left ear had come back. It hadn’t. The only thing I could hear was a new high-pitched ringing sound.

I knew something was wrong, but hearing loss was still not on my radar. Why would it have been? I was a healthy 28-year-old. I called the closest ENT office and explained the course of events over the last 24 hours. Maybe I didn’t convey something correctly, but I wasn’t put on the schedule until a week later. It can’t be anything emergent then, I thought.

A week went by with no improvement to my hearing or the ringing. On the day of my appointment I did a hearing test first then met with the doctor. He looked in both ears and said, “Everything is normal.” That’s strange. I was almost disappointed. I was hoping we’d get to the bottom of this. We reviewed the week’s events together again then started talking about my job as a nurse.

Out of the blue, he asked, “Have you ever heard of something called sudden hearing loss?” No, I said, with a curious undertone, thinking this was just friendly small talk with another medical professional. He said, “It could be from a viral infection or another underlying cause, and it can be permanent.” While I appreciated this education, I wasn’t sure where he was going with it. So I nodded and said, “Wow, that’s interesting,” to which he replied, “I think that’s what happened to you.”

Fast forward to today—five years into my nursing career and four years living with unilateral sudden sensorineural hearing loss, tinnitus (that high pitched ringing), and hyperacusis (sensitivity to everyday sound levels).

I look back at that first week of my diagnosis with so many unanswered questions. Why didn’t I know about sudden hearing loss? Why was I scheduled a week after my symptoms started instead of immediately? How did this even happen?

I’ve learned a lot about my diagnosis over the years, particularly that immediate treatment can decrease your chances of permanent hearing loss. According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, treatment when the cause is unknown is corticosteroids, either oral or injected by the ENT directly through the eardrum.

“Steroids can treat many disorders and usually work by reducing inflammation, decreasing swelling, and helping the body fight illness,” the NIDCD says. “Steroids should be used as soon as possible for the best effect and may even be recommended before all test results come back. Treatment that is delayed for more than two to four weeks is less likely to reverse or reduce permanent hearing loss.”

I started sharing my story on Instagram to raise awareness for sudden hearing loss with the hope that it helps someone else get immediate medical attention and gives their hearing a fighting chance at recovery.

As a nurse, I’m in a unique position to provide both a patient and provider perspective about this. I want to be an advocate for sudden hearing loss awareness. It needs to be recognized as an emergency requiring immediate medical attention.

I also hope it helps people find someone to relate to, as sudden hearing loss and its symptoms of tinnitus and/or hyperacusis can make a person feel quite lonely. I know I did when I was first diagnosed. I’ve received quite a few messages on Instagram from people who share similar experiences and follow along for positive and realistic content.

Victoria Jordan, R.N., lives in New Jersey. Find her at instagram.com/jerseytor_. This story appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Hearing Health magazine, out this month.

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