My audiogram has actually worsened some since the one I entered in my profile, I should update that… Even though the frequency changes are relatively mild, my speech discrimination scores are pretty bad and getting worse over time. I’m working in the emergency room this month, and I straight up can’t hear anyone worth a damn without the hearing aids (and even then I have to jack up the volume to near max on the speech in noise or lecture settings and inform my attendings of the hearing loss so that they don’t think I’m ignoring them). Less noisy environments are still not great without the aids.
Probably oversharing, but there is a medical (likely autoimmune) component to all this. High dose steroids drastically improve my speech discrimination to the point where I can at least talk to my family in the house without aids. But the doses are high enough that it would cause damage to the rest of my body long term, and probably not the greatest thing to be on during this whole coronavirus situation even in the short term. There are some other therapies that have shown limited promise, but finding an ENT willing to go off book and use drugs they aren’t very familiar with is easier said than done. I suppose I could prescribe them to myself when I actually have my license… but that’s frowned upon. The adage about the physician who treats himself and such.