I’ve had a bad case of cold runny nose lately and while it’s already cleared up a couple of weeks ago, I started getting that plugged up feeling on my right ear. It really affected my hearing, making it go from already bad to even worse, and I wasn’t sure whether I just experienced more hearing loss or whether it was something else.
Because I’m a DIY on the programming front, I even adjusted my right HA to compensate for the new loss. While the compensation made up for it, every time I took the hearing aids off, I immediately felt that imbalance again.
I’ve tried many things like shaking/tilting my head hard to the side (like when you go swimming and get water in your ear) to get any water out and lying on the side, yawning very hard, chewing gum, etc, to no avail. Also, every time I hiccup, I hear a whooshing sound on my right ear. But I didn’t get a feeling like there’s water in my right ear, however.
I recently went on a long trip by myself to do some moving and had nothing to do but drive and drive and drive and think and think and think. Then I remembered somebody said to me that they pinch their nose closed and close their mouth and blow hard to clear their ears out when they’re on a descending plane that’s causing a pressure imbalance to their ears. I tried that out and lo and behold, my right ear cleared out right away after hearing some bubbling on my right ear. Then the right hearing aid sounds louder than normal, but that’s because I overcompensated it to make up for the new hearing loss.
Just thought I’d share this on this forum in case somebody runs into a situation similar to mine and this tip proves helpful to them, too. I’m sure this trick is nothing new to a lot of people, but I’ve never tried it before. Usually yawning or chewing gum or swallowing cleared my ears when on a descending plane. I’d never had to resort to that action to clear out my ears.
Just be careful to do it when you’re sitting down and not driving. I didn’t know better and I was driving and the blowing out caused me to get dizzy and become disoriented after a few seconds. Luckily it didn’t last very long or else it’d be a disaster waiting to happen while you’re driving.
I’m so relieved now, because I was almost set to go see an ENT to check my ear out to see what’s wrong. Glad I didn’t have to. Now I’d just have to go back to the HA programming and put things back to normal. By the way, I didn’t really adjust the amplification in the programming per se. I reran the in-situ audiometry and found out that I had to up the threshold point in the 1-2KHz region up by quite a bit to hear it. But after the in-situ was done, I let the HA be re-prescribed to the new in-situ result. That way the new amplification is prescribed at the exact right place where the new (temporary) loss was occurring.