Hearing aid?

I'm only a few days behind in getting this posted. On Wednesday, April 20, I had an appt with Dr. Gidley, ENT. And Saturday, April 23 was the one year anniversary of my last radiation treatment. What a difference a year makes!

Appt w/ Dr. Gidley:
Did not have a hearing test this time. He did perform a quick eval with a tuning fork and I seemed to do pretty good with that. More "debris" came out of my ear - this time just picked out with special tweezers. Gross. The problem seems to be from scar tissue in the middle ear. That was caused by a combination of mastoidectomy & radiation. As I get older it will probably get worse simply due to aging and a residual effect of radiation.

Again, he asked if my hearing loss was bothering me. I told him that I do notice it in crowds when I can't hear a specific conversation with all the background noise. And it is sometimes difficult to hear in the car. (Although, my husband says he also has a hard time in the car too. However, I'm not sure the last time he had his hearing checked!) Dr. G said that we can look into hearing aids. I'll go back in 3-6 months to have another hearing test and see where we are. I don't really want a hearing aid right now and I don't want to miss out on conversations around me. Guess that means I'll be praying for my hearing to return in the next few months. As a side note: Dr. G said I should call his scheduler to let her know when I wanted to come back. I mentioned that it should only take about 4 calls to her to get that done (from experience, she's not very good at calling back). He left the room & came back with his business card and told me to email him directly when I knew when I wanted to come back and he would see to it that is was handled. Look - you can get personal service at MDA!

I must say that hearing loss was never one of the side effects I thought of when this all started 16 months ago.