[brianhama]

I suddenly lost the hearing in my left ear at the age of 24. One moment I was fine, eating a slice of pizza, the next moment I suddenly could sense something was wrong. I tried to stand up and walk, but my balance was gone. My ear felt full and there was a strange metallic echo. I waited about 24 hours and it hadn't gone away, so I went to the urgent care. By that time, just standing up was enough to cause me to vomit. I've had a pretty healthy life, so everything that was happening was rather disconcerting to me!

The doctors at urgent care erroneously diagnosed the problem as dehydration as a result of my telling them I had played tennis earlier before the incident. They sent me home with instructions to drink lots of water. After waiting another 48 hours completely unable to hear or even stand up, I went back to the urgent care. This time, they diagnosed it as an ear infection and gave me antibiotics. Over the next two weeks, my balance slowly returned, but what little hearing I still had slowly deteriorated further. About a month after it started, I finally was referred to an audiologist that concluded that I was completely deaf in my left ear, possibly due to a viral infection, but there isn't any way to know for sure the cause. Had it been treated with steroids immediately, it might have saved my hearing.

I am now 40 years old and have lived with being single sided deaf for half my life. Initially I didn't think much of it. I've slowly realized it has had a profound impact on my personality and sense of identity. I am much less social due to the difficulty I have hearing in group settings. Conversations are frustrating because it takes so much effort to hear the other person properly. I am reluctant to tell people about my condition because I don't want to be seen as handicapped in any way. Usually by the time I do end up telling someone, they say they had already figured as much.

Tinnitus is a major daily issue as well. I can’t seem to understand how this website helps though.

[Cerium]

My wife is deaf in her left ear as well. She doesn't usually tell people, but does tell people that she likes to walk on the left and sit on the left side of rectangular tables.

One interesting effect is that I have developed a preference for sitting or walking on people's right hand side, especially with good friends or people I respect.

The most interesting effect is I have noticed how much people take for granted the ability to sense where sound is coming from. Early on in our relationship I would occasionally perform "magic tricks" where I know immediately where a sound is. She would ask: how did you know where it was?

[nozzlegear]

> One moment I was fine, eating a slice of pizza, the next moment I suddenly could sense something was wrong. I tried to stand up and walk, but my balance was gone. My ear felt full and there was a strange metallic echo. I waited about 24 hours and it hadn't gone away, so I went to the urgent care. By that time, just standing up was enough to cause me to vomit. I've had a pretty healthy life, so everything that was happening was rather disconcerting to me!

This mirrors what turned out to be the onset of my pulsatile tinnitus – especially the "strange metallic echo". I remember sitting at my desk listening to the radio when I noticed it sounded like the radio's speakers were slightly out of sync with each other. I took my headphones off and listened, and my coworker's voice sounded metallic and robotic, almost exactly like a dalek from Doctor Who.

By the time I got to the doctor (same day), the metallic echo had passed but I had that fullness feeling in my ear that you describe and my doctor couldn't diagnose. Long story short, I'm not completely deaf but I have reduced hearing and permanent pulsatile tinnitus in my right ear.

I've had regular tinnitus since I was a kid, and I've thankfully been able to adjust to hearing the sound of my own heartbeat in my ear at all hours of the day without too much trouble. But when I describe what it's like to friends and family, I like to joke that it's like the heartbeat in Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-tale Heart.

> I am now 40 years old and have lived with being single sided deaf for half my life. Initially I didn't think much of it. I've slowly realized it has had a profound impact on my personality and sense of identity. I am much less social due to the difficulty I have hearing in group settings. Conversations are frustrating because it takes so much effort to hear the other person properly.

My reduced hearing has affected me more than I thought it did, and I've only come to realize it very recently. It's difficult for me to help my wife with her birding hobby because I'm always pointing in the wrong direction, for example. It also takes a lot of my patience not to get irritable when she's trying to talk to me while we're watching tv or listening to a book in the car, because I have a hard time tuning out things I can hear in my good ear and focusing on her with my bad ear.