In Wednesdat the hinges broke at work and the window fell on me. The impact was moderate, but I lost 20 db of hearing, the CT scan was clear, no bruises, cracks, hematoma, nothing. the doctors don’t know what happened, they give me steroids in the hospital. how is it possible that the only effect of the impact is hearing loss?
Did they rule out enlarged vestibular aqueducts?
Was the impact somehow dramatically loud?
Strange. I’m sorry for your loss.
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What test should be done to rule it out? the window hit on the head was strentgh medium, the headache for a while and then not at all, but the hearing got worse. I am currently in the hospital and they are giving me the steroid Dexaven and drugs to improve circulation.
three different doctors looked into my ears and found no abnormalities,as for the impact volume, it was quiet.
Yesterday I left the hospital, I continue the treatment at home, DEXAVEN was changed to Metypred 16mg, additionally Betaserc, Nootropil, Mesopral and vitamin B complex. Subjectively, I feel hearing improvement to the state before the accident. The doctor also recommends a hyperbaric chamber. Will this help (hope it doesn’t hurt)? I have a referral for further diagnostics of the cause of hearing loss as a result of an accident, can a cause-and-effect relationship be established if the tomography and medical examinations did not show any pathology?
Sorry I didn’t see your earlier responses.
I’m glad you feel the hearing is coming back a bit. The research on the hyperbaric chamber for hearing restoration is, as far as I’ve seen, a bit weak, but it is unlikely to hurt (though might hurt your pocketbook). Certainly it has benefits to healing in other realms and there are mechanistic reasons to think that it might help. A friend of mine experienced hearing loss after rapid decompression during scuba and it returned after going in the hyperbaric chamber, but hyperbaric chamber for rapid decompression is much more standard. I think if I was offered one at no or low charge I’d go, but if I had to pay a great deal for it and it felt financially burdensome I might not.
It’s possible that they will never find the cause. I would imagine that they will work hard to try to find a cause because doctors love a medical mystery–and if they can solve it, maybe they can publish a paper. Of course I don’t mean to minimize the reality that doctors became doctors to help people and they also want to rule out things that might need attention and make sure you are well-cared for. But growing up in a medical family I can tell you that the mysteries really rivet their attention and I would bet you currently have a lot of medical professionals devoting some part of their easter weekend to thinking about you.
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Thank you for your answer, I have a problem because the company I work for where the accident happened will probably need an expert opinion that the window damaged my hearing. I did not receive such an opinion at the hospital, the doctors gave me a referral to a specialist clinic that investigates the causes of hearing loss, but my deadline is January 2024 or September 2023 outside the public health service.
Treatments in the hyperbaric chamber have been set for 15 visits and I have them for free as part of my health care, I am waiting for a call after Easter and I am wondering if there is anything else I can do in my situation, since I am on sick leave until the end of April. I’m a bit concerned about taking additional supplements, I haven’t found solid data to justify such experimentation, and since my hearing has improved, I prefer to be careful.
What caught my attention, you speak very kindly and respectfully about the work of the medical community. I think it is important to trust doctors, they often sincerely want to help us and do a lot to save our health and find the reasons for its loss, but they are not gods, their knowledge and capabilities are limited and where they are helpless, accept what happened in humility and hope that in time something will clear up.
Ah, that’s difficult. I’m not terribly familiar with that sort of insurance stuff, but without a pre- and post-incident audiogram, all the expert can really say is “patient said their hearing was fine before the accident and now it’s not”. In a situation like a car accident, at least the expert can say “noise levels associated with accidents are known to be damaging” or some such. Hearing loss from what you describe is unusual (I’ve never heard of anything like it), so if there’s no clear understanding of how it might have happened . . . you might be disappointed. I hope it goes your way though.
I mentioned enlarged vestibular aqueduct before because that’s a known condition in which a realiably mild hit to the head can cause hearing loss, and it can go undiagnosed prior to an incident. I would expect that the doctors would look for it, though, and that it would be ruled out with CT or MRI. If it’s the first thing that popped into my mind, it would surely be the one of the first things an ENT thought of.
I do. I’ve actually had some very poor experiences with doctors, some very recently, particularly inter-professionally. However, my father was a specialist and for a while pretty pre-eminent in his field. He was tremendously dedicated, definitely a workaholic, extremely bright, very much a nerd and a scientist, and I watched him work a shocking number of hours only to come home and pour through medical journals. He was also one of those almost uncomfortably principled and ethical types. He saved a lot of lives. Additionally, through grad school I had occassion to work with a lot of similarly dedicated, driven people. So despite running into my fair share of arrogant, bottom-of-the-class, junk-bedside-manner doctors, my early experience tends to guide my default assumption and until a doctor personally burns me I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.