Bumping Into People With Hearing Loss

By Kathi Mestayer

Recently I was backing out of my parking spot in the Barnes & Noble parking lot. I noticed another car in my rear-view mirror, backing up right behind me, approaching my bumper with apparent disregard, and so I finally beeped my horn. A couple of times. Loud. Well, that bumper kept coming, and then hit mine, not hard, but a definite impact. The car pulled out and drove away.

So, I do what anyone would do in that situation—I make a note of the licence plate, and followed it. After a couple of blocks, the car turns into another parking lot. I park behind it, knock on the window, and when it rolls down, said, "Did you know you just hit me in the Barnes & Noble parking lot?"

"No! Oh! I'm so sorry!" said the driver. She lifts up the back door of her SUV, showing me the cute little toys (including a tiny toy stroller) she had bought for her grandchildren. She thought the impact was one of them hitting the back window, or just falling over.

"Didn't you hear me blow my horn?"

"No! You blew your horn?"

"Are you hard of hearing?"

"Yes! I had my hearing tested and they told me I have a hearing loss, but to come back when I can't hear anymore."

"What?!"

What ensued was a few minutes of conversation in which I shared this information:

1) Go back now to get your hearing loss treated. If you didn't hear my horn when our cars were 12 inches to zero inches apart, that's not a good sign.

2) You can't locate sounds because you have a much worse loss in one ear. The driver acknowledged she was almost completely deaf in one ear.

3) Go to a good audiologist, not a testing closet in the back corner of your pharmacy (really!).

At the end, she said, "I just know there's a reason we were brought together! Give me a hug?"

We had a big, warm hug and went our separate ways.

When Everyday Noise Is Unbearable

By Pallavi Bharadwaj

Like many people, George Rue loved music. He played guitar in a band. He attended concerts often. In his late 20s, he started feeling a dull ache in his ears after musical events. After a blues concert almost nine years ago, “I left with terrible ear pain and ringing, and my life changed forever,” said Rue, 45, of Waterford, Connecticut. He perceived all but the mildest sounds as not just loud, but painful. It hurt to hear.

Mr. Rue was given a diagnosis of hyperacusis, a nonspecific term that has assorted definitions, including “sound sensitivity,” “decreased sound tolerance,” and “a loudness tolerance problem.”

Hyperacusis can be extremely debilitating, and at present, there is no cure. The researchers in The American Journal of Audiology study provided an overview of the field, and possible related areas, in the hope of facilitating future research. They reviewed and referenced literature on hyperacusis and related areas. This study has been funded by Hyperacusis Research and Hearing Health Foundation. 

Hyperacusis encompasses a wide range of reactions to sound, which can be grouped into the categories of excessive loudness, annoyance, fear, and pain. Many different causes have been proposed, and it will be important to appreciate and quantify different subgroups. Reasonable approaches to assessing the different forms of hyperacusis are emerging, including psychoacoustical measures, questionnaires, and brain imaging. Hyperacusis can make life difficult for many, forcing sufferers to dramatically alter their work and social habits.

Loud noises, even when they aren’t painful, can damage both the sensory cells and sensory nerve fibers of the inner ear over time, causing hearing impairment, said M. Charles Liberman, a professor of otology at Harvard Medical School, who heads a hearing research lab at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. And for some people who are susceptible, possibly because of some combination of genes that gives them “tender” ears, noise sets in motion “an anomalous response,” he said.

This article has been adapted from a post on The New York Times’s Wellness blog. To read the original article, please click here.

For information about tinnitus (ringing in the ears), please see these resources on the HHF website.

Read the story on Hyperacusis on HHF’s website.

What Is That Noise? My Take on Living with Tinnitus

By Shari Eberts

I have a 40-50% hearing loss in both of my ears, but only mild tinnitus.  I am grateful for that.  Sometimes I feel that the tinnitus is worse than the hearing loss!  Unexplained sounds buzzing and whistling in your head can make you question your sanity.  And give you the worst headache known to man.  The lack of sound seems almost a relief in retrospect.

Thus far, I have experienced two types of tinnitus. The first has been occurring on and off for several years and is not that troublesome.  I am not sure what the trigger is, or even if there is a trigger, but all of a sudden, I will hear a sound like a fluorescent light was just turned on, followed by a high-pitched beeeeeeeep that lasts for 30-60 seconds.  It will often start softly; build to a crescendo, and then taper off, like someone has turned the fluorescent light back off.  It happens in noise and in silence.  It comes and it goes, maybe once or twice a week.  Strange, but not bad.

But recently, a new type of tinnitus has started, and this one is more debilitating. Again, I’m not sure if there is a specific trigger, but it seems to happen more often after I am exposed to rhythmic loud noises (like a bathroom fan) or to bright lights.  It starts suddenly, is much louder than my friend the fluorescent light, and can continue for an hour or more.  It is exhausting.  I cannot think.  I can’t hear what people are saying to me over the ringing. I want to lie down, but sometimes that is not possible.  I work to focus on the real sounds around me and carry on. 

To read more, please click here. 

Shari Eberts is Board Chair, HHF. She regularly writes on her blog and tweets at @sharieberts. 

Constant Companion

By Bill Meehan

I am a rock drummer. As a teen and young adult, we played very loud and for hours at a stretch. I sensed nothing bad happening at the time besides some bothersome post-concert ringing in my ears. I was in my 20s and invincible. 

In my early 30s I noticed a slight ringing in my ears for the first time—without a loud event as the cause. It was troublesome enough that I went to the doctor. After a thorough examination I heard that word for the first time: “tinnitus.” Okay, great, there is a name for this. “What pill do I take?” I asked the doctor. “There is no treatment currently,” he said with a knowing smile and walked out the door. Seriously, he walked out the door and didn’t even give me a chance to ask another question. I sat there for a moment in the empty examination room and listened to the ringing in my ears for a few minutes in disbelief. Will I never be able to sit in a quiet room again?

I lived with this for years and it was only troubling in very quiet surroundings. A fan blowing or a TV playing in the background was usually enough to drown out the faint, high-pitch ringing.

Then one day it all changed. I was watching TV and noticed a loud sound of crickets. I thought it must be the TV. I turned off the TV and still heard the clear and very loud sound of crickets mixed with a high-pitched tone. I was convinced the TV must be about to explode. I ran over and pulled out the plug. The sound was still there. I covered my ears and was horrified to realize the sound was in my own head. It was well over 100 decibels. I felt sick as the hours passed painfully and slowly. I didn’t sleep.

The next morning I went to the only doctor in all of San Francisco who could see me that day. After the exact same examinations I received years earlier, he told me that same thing, “Sorry, there is nothing I can do.”  

After a couple of weeks I was suicidal. Every day was torture. My only relief was to re-create the sound and pitch on my keyboard and play it at maximum volume. When I stopped playing the loud tone I had 10 seconds of relative peace and then the tinnitus came back. I did this over and over again.

Six weeks had gone by and I noticed a slight reduction in the volume. It was something to hold out onto—a little bit of hope. Could it actually be decreasing even though several doctors told me there was no hope? Little by little, day by day, I found moments of peace and an overall easing of the torment. Finally it was bearable most of the time.

A few years later I had another acute attack, but this time I knew there was hope and light on the other side. I went to an upscale doctor who specialized in tinnitus. He had awards all over his wall. He must be good, right? I told my tale. I told him about the acute attack that lasted for weeks, that it was much worse after waking from a nap, and that the ambient noise level had no impact on severity. He was a much-lauded doctor who specializes in tinnitus and I thought he would understand. “That’s not how it works,” he said, as he walked out of the room.

I now have a hearing aid I wear (I have mild-moderate hearing loss) that gives me some relief during the worst bouts. I wear it in my left ear. I also have an app on my phone that can help soothe me to sleep using white noise. I still play the drums, but they are electronic and I can control the volume. I can live a full and rewarding life, but my tinnitus is always there—my constant companion.

One Day in 1967

By Michele Ahlman

Growing up, I remember thinking how cool it was that I had a German birth certificate: a hand-typed, raggedy piece of paper identifying, in German, my birth in a U.S. Army hospital in Heidelberg.

In the late ’60s my dad, Richard Uzuanis, was a 23-year old tank commander for the 3rd Battalion 68th Armor stationed in Mannheim. I’ve always known my dad lost a lot of his hearing while serving in the military. But we never talked about it or the impact it had, until recently. Apparently, during a live fire tank gunnery exercise in 1967, one of the tanks misfired. And at the time, hearing protection was not standard-issue equipment.

It was Dad’s responsibility to remove the misfire. “I got into the tank and opened the breach to remove the misfired round,” he says. “But the round was swollen due to overheating. I couldn’t get it out or close the breach. As I moved quickly to evacuate through the tank hatch, the round exploded, sending me 20 feet in the air.”

To read the full article, please visit the Fall 2015 Issue of Hearing Health Magazine.

If you are a veteran, current service member, or have family or friends who have bravely served our country, review these resources about hearing loss and tinnitus.

Show support for our veterans via one of these ways:

• Sharing your hearing loss or tinnitus story

• Donating at the workplace

• Donating via HHF’s website

• Reading and sharing the veterans’ special issue of Hearing Health magazine

A Musician Tunes Into Positive Thoughts

By Tara Guastella

Lynn Crisci and her boyfriend, Doug Julian, attended the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, sitting on the edge of a sidewalk café, about 30 feet from the first bombing that occurred that fateful day.

When the explosions occurred, Lynn watched the smoke, debris, and shrapnel travel upward. But what she later learned is that pressure cooker bombs are designed to explode horizontally, rather than vertically. This fact appears to be part of the reason why Lynn incurred a frontal lobe brain injury, hearing loss in her right ear (which was facing the explosion), and constant tinnitus. Other people she knew who were closer to the explosion—but standing up instead of sitting down—did not suffer the same type of injuries.

Though Lynn had her hearing tested after the explosion, and has documented hearing loss, the doctors did not recommend a hearing aid. This makes it very challenging for Lynn in situations where background noise is present, such as in a busy restaurant or bar.  The hearing loss plus her brain injury makes it often impossible for Lynn to hear, and then mentally process, what someone in a noisy setting is saying to her. Lynn feels her hearing problems put a strain on her relationships, embarrassing herself and others and drawing negative attention.

Tinnitus impacts Lynn to the point where she has much difficulty falling asleep and usually gets three hours of sleep nightly. Her tinnitus is further aggravated by stress and loud noises, which makes the tinnitus worse.

Lynn also suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), putting another strain on her long-term relationship with Doug. “I feel that he often ends up taking care of me, more like a dependent than an equal partner,” says Lynn. “I feel like a burden to him which leaves us both frustrated, stressed, and unable to focus on my strengths.”

One positive is that Lynn knows she has survived a traumatic event before. A professional musician who started performing at age 5, Lynn had a workplace accident in 2006 that left her in a wheelchair for several years and needing a cane to walk for several years after that.

Not only is Lynn walking today, but she also completed the 2014 Boston Marathon. “I did it to take back my neighborhood,” she says. Living blocks from the marathon finish line, she was sick and tired of feeling afraid every time she went outside. With the goal of facing her fears in mind, she trained for five months—often daily and often in pain—in order to finish the Boston Marathon. She had never been a runner before, much less race a marathon.

Lynn’s hearing loss affects her everyday life as well as her career. Music does not sound the same to her anymore. She’s far from giving up, however. “You don’t know what you can do until you want it badly enough,” she says. Lynn is hopeful that our Hearing Restoration Project (HRP) will restore her hearing one day so she can reclaim her artistic calling.

"Hearing Loss Is a Non-Healing Injury"

By Tara Guastella

Shannon Silvestri and her two teenage children attended the 2013 Boston Marathon to cheer on dad Kevin. It was the third time they’d be watching him run the marathon.

The family was invited to watch the race by Ashworth Awards, the company that creates the marathon medals and which is based in the same town where the family lives. They were at the Lenox Hotel, located at Exeter and Boylston streets in Boston. After Kevin ran by (finishing what would be his personal best race time), and Shannon received an automated text message that he had finished the race, they gathered their things, snapped a few photos, and began exiting out a side door of the Lenox on Exeter Street. Shannon was walking between her son in front of her, her daughter with a friend behind her, and two of her husband’s friends behind them.

As they were passing through the barricades set up to keep the thousands of spectators organized, the first explosion occurred. It was the first of two homemade pressure cooker bombs that exploded that day. The blast occurred to the left side of Shannon and her family, but the sound bounced off the building and hit Shannon in her right ear. “I could feel the air and the sound waves hit me,” she says. “I could really feel it.”

She immediately covered her ears, fell to the ground, and then looked front and back to check on her children. "Everything seemed like it was in slow motion," she says. Her daughter immediately let out a big scream, knowing her father was out there. Her son ran and Shannon finally found him a couple of streets away. Shannon says, "This was his fight-or-flight response."

Seconds later, the second blast occurred and again it hit Shannon in her right ear as she was turned to comfort her daughter. “It was such a strong feeling of pressure, or a blockage, in both my ears. It felt like I really needed to pop them,” she says. “All I could hear was a muffled chaotic mess and when I looked back all I saw was smoke, debris, and metal barricades flying through the air as people were trying to escape the horror that just occurred.”

Shannon thought terrorists were attacking the city by plane. Her cousin’s husband was killed in the 9/11 attacks so this was the first thing that came to mind. Needing to find Kevin, they headed toward the family meeting area even though law enforcement was trying to keep people from entering this area. Shannon remembers thinking, “I don’t care how many pieces he is in, I am taking him home.” She felt selfish, hurt, empty, alone, and every other emotion she could think of. She didn’t care what scenario she was bringing her kids into, she had to bring the four of them home together.

What the family didn’t realize at the time was that they were closer to the blasts than Kevin was. At the time of the explosions, Kevin was farther down the road, past the finish line, picking up his finisher medal.

Since cell phone service wasn’t working properly, one of Kevin’s friends who was with the family ran ahead to find him. "He was like my superman, whipping off his jacket and saying, ‘I will find him,’” Shannon says. Suddenly, she saw Kevin emerge with the friend. Kevin was uninjured.

Shannon hugged him and remembers saying, “These are the times I appreciate your stubbornness.” Kevin had earlier said he wanted to beat his first marathon time.

Next the family attempted to get out of Boston but everything was on lockdown, including Shannon’s car. They decided to walk the nearly three miles to the Boston Athletic Club. Her son was very upset that Shannon had scraped her knee and wanted to get her something for it. The family stayed there for almost four hours. It was very emotional with people hugging, crying, and reuniting with family and friends.

Shannon went into a restroom because she felt like she needed a good cry but didn’t want to do so in front of her kids. Inside, she met a young teenage girl who worked at the club. The girl couldn’t get in touch with her mother and was frightened by the stories she was hearing. “I told her that I’m a mother and asked if she wanted a hug,” Shannon says. The girl hugged her tightly and the two cried together for a few minutes and then felt better.

Later that week after the bombings, Shannon’s left ear “popped” as did her son’s ears. As for Shannon's right ear, that never popped. Luckily, her daughter’s ears were unaffected.

To help survivors cope with the events of last year’s bombing, Shannon started a website called Boston Strong: Strength, Courage, & Healing and she began making Boston Strong pins/charms. All of the proceeds go to help survivors.

Over a year later, Shannon’s hearing in her right ear has worsened, as has her tinnitus, and her left ear also has a degree of hearing loss. Certain noises and sensations cause pain, a condition known as hyperacusis, so she decided not to get hearing aids. Her audiologist told her that at some point she may lose most if not all hearing in her right ear.

Recently, Shannon accepted a position at the Massachusetts Office of Victim Assistance, which has been instrumental in helping marathon survivors. She will be leading a peer-to-peer support network for people who sustained hearing loss as a result of the blasts. Shannon says she wants to help others cope. “People don’t recognize hearing loss as something that is life-changing. It’s a non-healing injury,” she says.

How My Sudden Hearing Loss Paved the Way to a New Life's Mission

By Monique Hammond, Guest Blogger

Like everyone else does, I took my clean, crisp hearing for granted. But over a four-hour period in September 2005, I lost my hearing in my left ear. That same day, an intense vertigo attack made the world spin out of control. I became violently ill and spent the next two days in the hospital. My whole inner ear and nerves had come under attack.

The final verdict was that I had suffered a sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL), which is considered a medical emergency. The doctors suspected the cause to be a viral infection complicated by an excessively loud noise exposure from a church fundraiser the day before. I largely credit the treatment of oral steroids and antiviral medication that I received at the very start for being able to regain limited hearing.

The “ear event,” as I like to call it, has left me with a severe one-sided hearing loss, never-ending, high-pitched tinnitus, and annoying sound sensitivities, which make the adjustment of hearing aids quite tricky. Although hearing aids have helped many people beyond their wildest dreams, they have not been tremendously effective for me. Strangely enough, I feel that my hearing aid helps me more with stability—as I am still plagued by pesky balance issues—than with hearing acuity.  

Going back to work only reinforced the realization that my job was eroding right from under me: I simply could not function safely and effectively anymore in the noise-confused environment of the hospital pharmacy that was my place of work. I had enjoyed my work and coworkers and I also appreciated my paycheck. Losing all of that has been emotionally a most difficult adjustment.

I am quite open about my challenges as I have found that to be the best policy for me. I am lucky because my friends and family have been very supportive. Over time, they have come to appreciate the varied challenges that hearing loss bestows on those affected. Yes, I must remind them now and then not to talk to me through walls. But sometimes people forget.  

Of all the hearing-related issues that I have come across, I have chosen noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) as the focus for any of my training, education, and advocacy efforts. Why? Because this is a preventable disability that is on a steep rise. The damage is irreversible but completely avoidable. As yet there is no cure for any kind of hearing loss, and organized public education on this timely topic as well as on hearing loss in general is greatly lacking. (Learn about research toward a cure by HHF’s Hearing Restoration Project.)

All my life I have been a big believer in prevention and education and from that aspect nothing has changed. This why I wrote my book, “What Did You Say?,” and why I bring my new life mission—to help people hear better longer—into a gaping public education void.

These days I am kept busy working with support groups, leading training sessions, doing public speaking, and writing articles and a blog. Although I do use Facebook connected to my website, my favorite social medium is Twitter. It is an ideal tool to keep up with news and research and to communicate information about a myriad of hearing loss topics to my followers.

Yes, the journey into the world of hearing loss has been a long and often thorny road paved with fears and tears but also with plenty of revelations and amazement. Life is different now, but as Senator Hubert H. Humphrey once said: “It is not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left.”

Monique Hammond is a registered pharmacist and the author of “What Did You Say? An Unexpected Journey Into the World of Hearing Loss.” Learn more at moniquehammond.com.

Boston Bombings Leave Doctors Using Wartime Surgeries to Fix Social Work Student's Ruptured Ear Cavity

By Tara Guastella

On April 15, 2013, Lauren Vulcano, then a 24-year-old school counseling graduate student, and her boyfriend Mark Snickenberger, also then 24, were watching Mark’s brother run in the 2013 Boston Marathon. The events that unfolded that day changed the way Lauren will hear forever.

The day was as pleasant as any until the first backpack containing a homemade pressure cooker bomb exploded. Lauren was standing just four feet away. “I first felt a very calming feeling, almost euphoric,” she says. “I could really feel the heat and it felt nice, like being on beach—but I was completely unaware of what was happening. It felt like five minutes but in reality it was only a matter of seconds.”

Mark panicked and grabbed Lauren to try and move her away from the scene. She stood still with both of her hands covering her ears standing perfectly straight—like a “telephone pole,” she says. Lauren tried to plug her ears as hard as she could since the extreme loudness and subsequent ringing in her ears (tinnitus) physically hurt.

Suddenly Lauren’s right ear started to bleed just as the second bomb exploded; she learned later that her eardrum had ruptured. “Mark put his arm around me and guided or dragged me down the street, pressing my injured right ear against his left shoulder to apply pressure,” Lauren says.  “Finally I snapped out of the state of shock and began to understand what was going on.” Once Lauren and Mark made it to a safe location in an AT&T store, Lauren noticed the eight-inch gash on the side of Mark’s leg with blood pouring out of it.

Lauren and Mark are circled in the above photo as they escaped from the Boston Marathon bombing.

Lauren began taking off her coat in an attempt to take care of her boyfriend’s leg. She then realized her own shoulder was bleeding. “Since we didn’t know what was in the air, I was instructed to put my coat back on,” says Lauren. “I felt so helpless because I wanted to do something to help Mark since he saved my life by dragging me out of the bomb scene.”

As she made attempts to scream and call for help, Lauren realized she couldn’t hear herself screaming, and she thought no one else could hear her screaming either. “In the AT&T store, someone brought a wheelchair in for me and then they ran Mark into the medical tent,” Lauren says.

Lauren and Mark are circled in the above photo as they escaped from the Boston Marathon bombing.

While they were tending to Mark’s leg, Lauren left to find Mark’s mom. “After a quick discussion of who should go with him to the hospital, Mark’s mom said ‘no, you go. He needs you.’ I grabbed his stretcher and helped the first responders run it to an ambulance. When no one instructed us which ambulance to go to, I just picked one and started pulling his stretcher into its back entrance.”

Lauren was so worried about Mark’s leg that it wasn’t until they arrived at the hospital that she realized she also had a black eye and her forehead was bleeding. Once at the hospital, Lauren says she finally felt safe and laid down beside Mark to let the doctors care for them both.

“I was examined by the on-call ear surgeon who had an impeccable bedside manner, given the situation,” Lauren says. “I then learned that a BB from the bomb had gone straight into my ear, hit the cochlea, and bounced out, rupturing my eardrum and shattering the malleus bone [a small middle ear bone].”

Lauren was later released from the hospital and arrived home around 9 or 10pm that evening; Mark had to stay overnight. A piece of nylon from the backpack that contained the bomb had melted into Lauren’s hair and a portion of skin on the right side of her head was burned so badly from the explosive heat that her hair fell out. “Not wanting to be alone that night I made my mom give me a sponge bath and then stayed on the phone with Mark for the remainder of the night.”

The following day Lauren went to visit the ear surgeon at the surgeon’s office. Since the loud blast Lauren experienced is considered a military injury, not a civilian injury, her doctors continually consulted with military physicians.

Lauren’s doctor used an updated version of an old wartime surgery technique. In the past working out on the field, wartime doctors would place a piece of cigarette paper between the pieces of the eardrum in hopes some of the skin cells would "crawl" across the paper to make a skin graft. Today this surgery is more complex with better material used, but it didn’t work for Lauren’s ear. “For several months, my ear was just still too damaged for the skin graft to take,” Lauren says. “I had a real surgery in June and when that didn’t work, my doctor referred me to Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.”

Lauren had another surgery in August and when that didn't work, they tried a number of those "quick fixes" again. In each of these surgeries another piece of Lauren’s ear injury puzzle is revealed. “My next surgery will be where I receive a prosthetic malleus. It's frustrating that after a year of the best medical care, my ear hasn't gotten much better. It's just too damaged from the blast,” she says.

Even after undergoing three surgeries and still not being able to hear out of her right ear, Lauren graduated on time (taking extra classes) from her master’s program earning a dual license in school guidance counseling as well as school social work/adjustment counseling and will be a school guidance counselor this fall.

“As I was sitting in classes learning about things like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, I began to become very aware of my own symptoms,” Lauren says. “I knew how to identify the signs and I knew what these conditions looked like.”

Living through the blasts, though taxing on health and personal life, has greatly benefited her career, she says. “This past year I had a full-time internship at an elementary school. Feeling things firsthand really helped me to become aware of children’s symptoms much more accurately since I knew exactly what to look for,” she says.

Another aspect that helped Lauren overcome the experience of the explosions and her hearing loss is being able to talk about it. “I am naturally a ‘chatty Cathy,’ so when I went back to classes after the bombing I didn’t want people to ignore the elephant in the room—that I was in a bombing. I wanted to lay it all out there and give them an opportunity to ask me questions so it was all out in the open,” she says. “So I asked my professors if I could give a presentation of how I escaped after the bombing and talk about it with classmates.” All of Lauren’s professors were incredibly understanding, she says.

As she first began sharing her experience, Lauren would sob through the entire narration of the day’s events. Now after being completely open about it for over a year, Lauren can recount that day without a tear in her eye. Lauren, Mark, and Mark’s brother ran the 2014 Boston Marathon with other marathon blast survivors, including the Campbell family, Dave Fortier, Lynn Crisci, Shannon Silvestri, and many others.

Boston Marathon Injuries

By Yishane Lee

Last year, Dave Fortier ran the Boston Marathon in honor of a friend who has leukemia. He experienced up close the two bomb blasts that forever altered the event, becoming one of the nearly 300 people who were injured. A piece of shrapnel became embedded in his right foot, and the immediate ringing in the ears he experienced is now permanent.

Fortier’s foot healed quickly and he was able to race the New York City Marathon seven months later, again to raise funds for leukemia research. But while supporting his friend will always be a priority, Fortier now has a personal interest in promoting the search for a cure for hearing loss and tinnitus. “On long runs I think about things I want to do, and after finishing Boston again this year, my first thought has been to take care of my hearing,” says Fortier, who lives in Newburyport, Mass. “I’m very happy to be supporting Hearing Health Foundation and the search for a cure.”

Fortier, 49, and members of a Boston Marathon survivors support group are running the New Hampshire Reach the Beach Relay in September. The race spans 200 miles and 24 hours, with each member of a 12-person team taking separate legs—including during the middle of the night—totaling nearly 17 miles each.

“Before this year’s Boston Marathon, everybody in this survivor community felt a lot of unity. We had 28 people running the race, and many were first-time marathoners like Chris Campbell,” Fortier says. “I could really see we all felt a sense of belonging, and one of my biggest fears was that after the finish line this feeling would end for all of us. So we quietly went online and registered for Reach the Beach, and when someone asked, ‘Gosh, what do we do next?’ we had an answer—I said, ‘Well guys, we’ve got something for you, if you’re interested—I signed us all up for this race.’”

Fortier says they easily filled one 12-person team, and the personal investment in finding a cure affects several who are running.

“If you see the videos and photos of when the first explosion happens, I’m the guy with a black hat and black shorts who is right behind the gentleman who falls,” he says. “I’m reaching up and holding the side of my head. The sound—it felt like someone hit me with a brick. I actually thought someone behind me had cuffed my ear with a fist. I just remember that pain. The ringing happened instantaneously.”

He adds, “The ringing today is as loud as it was that day. I’ve learned to suppress it a little bit, but when I start talking about it and thinking about it, I can hear it. It’s ever present.”

Although his hearing loss in his left ear, which was facing the first blast, is so far mild, Fortier has been taking steps to compensate. “Now I tell people when I’m first meeting them that I will be leaning toward them to hear better, so they don’t think I’m getting in their personal space for no reason. I’ve also learned to look at the speaker’s lips for clues,” he says.

At night, Fortier uses a combination of white noise and low-volume talk radio to tamp down the tinnitus. “But I’m lucky if I get three solid hours a night. If something wakes me up—like the dog needing to go out at 3:30 a.m.—well, then, I’m up for the day.”

“My injuries were so minor compared with everyone else, but while the stitches in my foot are long gone, for me hearing is the bigger issue for sure,” he says. Fortier is excited and encouraged by the progress of the Hearing Restoration Project (HRP), including the groundbreaking regeneration of inner ear hair cells in adult mice by Albert Edge, Ph.D., an HRP consortium member at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School.

Unlike other species, such as birds and fish, mammals lose their hearing permanently once inner ear hair cells are damaged by, for instance, a sudden loud noise. The HRP’s goal is to translate the ability of birds and fish to naturally regenerate hair cells to mammals, including humans.