I Love Dr. B!

Did I mention that I love Dr. B?  I called his office when they opened this morning at 8:30am.  I explained my reduced hearing, the increased tinnitus and the sensitivity to noise.  They took down my info and called me back 10 minutes later.  Dr. B was out for the day, but they wanted me to come in for a hearing test, they would then fax him my results.  They got me in at 9am and my hearing tested even worse than I expected.  I now have reduced hearng at all fequencies and my speech recognition has dropped from 90% to 48%.  I struggled to even get it that high, there was a lot of guessing going on.  I left the office and was back to work by 9:30am.  Around 11am his office called back and said they had called in an RX for prednisone. The regimine is pretty high, 12 pills a day for the first week, then tapering off the 2nd week. 130 total.  All worth it if I have a chance at salvaging my hearing.

Late in the afternoon a new symptom has appeared.  A thumping, wooshing sound.  I can feel and hear my heartbeat in my ear.  With this I feel pressure as well.  I'm hoping the prednisone takes care of this as well.     Crossing my fingers and saying my prayers.

I've often seen the words "useful hearing" and "serviceable hearing" used when describing AN's.  Out of curiousity, I Googled that as well, searching for the scale that I previously found but did not feel was pertinent at the time.  Based on this, my hearing currently fits in the "Non-serviceable" category, but just by a point.  I'm hoping the steroids will boost me back to the serviceable range at a minimum.  Non-serviceable hearing means that in the case of a surgical removal the surgeon would most likely use an approach that would certainly sacrifice the patients hearing  (rendering the patient single sided deaf) in order to save the facial and balance nerves.


Here is what I found:  

Gardner Robertson Scale

• Grade I (good-excellent)
  • pure tone audiogram (dB) : 0-30
  • speech discrimination (%) : 70-100
• Grade II (serviceable)
  • pure tone audiogram (dB) : 31-50
  • speech discrimination (%) : 50-69
• Grade III (non-serviceable)
  • pure tone audiogram (dB) : 51-90
  • speech discrimination (%) : 5-49
• Grade IV (poor)
  • pure tone audiogram (dB) : 91-max
  • speech discrimination (%) : 1-4
• Grade V (none)
  • pure tone audiogram (dB) : not testable
  • speech discrimination (%) : 0
• If PTA and speech do not correlate, use lower class.