Can my hearing improve?

[Matthew]

2 months ago I was at a car show and a car started to shoot fire from exhaust. The sound was like a gun shots.

I did hearing tests and I lost some ability to hear at 4khz in my right ear. 2 weeks later I did another hearing test but when my right ear was tested the results were normal, but I didn’t hear sounds at 4khz normally, it was more like I felt the change in my ear and in the tone of my tinnitus when the sound was played. About one week ago i did another test and the results were almost the same as in the first one, but my masked bone conducted results were 15 db better then air conducted in damaged frequencies.

Another thing is I got tinnitus after that incident. I had slight tinnitus in the silence my whole life, but now it’s louder in my right ear. It’s not that bad, I hear it only when it’s quiet, I don’t have trouble with sleeping but it makes me feel down when I hear it.

My questions are:

1. Why i could sense the sound in my 2nd hearing test?
2. Can my hearing improve? (My bone conducted results are better, so I guess my ear have an ability to hear these sounds)
3. Is it possible for tinnitus to go away in my case?
4. Should I think about hearing aids? I haven’t noticed any problems hearing people so far.
   
   
   
   
   

[Neville]

There is some recovery of hearing after a traumatic noise event, but it’s on a much shorter timeline than what you are reporting. If you have two audiograms showing the loss and one weird one in the middle showing that things are normal, the middle one was probably testing error. 4kHz bone conduction isn’t that precise–its common for it to be dramatically better than expected and that doesn’t necessarily suggest a conductive hearing loss. This is likely permanent. The tinnitus may improve over time.

The loss is mild, probably not enough to consider hearing aids yet and certainly not enough if you aren’t noticing any functional deficits.

Sorry that happened to you.