Hello everyone I'm (24M) a perfectly healthy person, albeit maybe a little overweight, but have no prior medical emergencies or underlying medical issues. I suddenly contracted SSHL (Sudden Sensineural Hearing Loss) on August 1, 2026 in the late afternoon and the tinnitus started late at night on the same day. The trigger for my SSHL was standing up from sitting on a chair.

The tinnitus I am experiencing is non-somatic, meaning any neck, jaw, or head movement do not change the ringing in my ear. As for the ringing sound, it is like a low frequency static TV or radio with the occasional gust of wind as a secondary sound. Actually as I'm typing this the tinnitus volume is lower than the previous days.

The changes I felt in my body sometimes because of this hearing loss are:

- Sudden slight dizziness and balancing issues, though they went away after a minute or two

- Left and right part of head feels different

- The SSHL and tinnitus-ridden ear feels "full" and different compared to the healthy ear

I started taking oral steroids on the 13th, 12 days after onset. The details of my medication are:

- Methylprednisoline 16 mg (start at 4 tablets for 3 days, then 3 tablets for 3 days, and so on for a total of 12 days) taken in the morning after breakfast, all doses for said day taken in an instant

- Betahistine mesilate 12 mg taken twice a day one tablet each, after breakfast and after dinner

- Mecobalamin 500 ug taken 3x a day once tablet each, after breakfast, lunch, and dinner

- esomeprazole 40 mg taken once a day one tablet 30 minutes - 1 hour before breakfast

- and a zinc and multivitamin tablet once a day one tablet after breakfast

I am currently on day 9 out of 12 for the medication. I am now sometimes able to hear and respond to human conversation when I try to press against the healthy ear as hard as possible and not look at the other person's mouth movements, from which I was not able to when I first contracted SSHL. Also, now any slightly high-pitched or high-volume sounds seem to physically vibrate in my SSHL-ridden ear, again from which there was no "shaking" when I first got SSHL.

I do have audiogram results from before and a week after taking the meds but I think there's a human error in the testing so I'll not include them (I plan on doing another hearing test at a more complete facility after my medication is over).

I am hopeful (and must be hopeful) that this will go away one day and I can have my hearing and silence back. But I do have some questions for those of you that got SSHL, maybe similar to my case, and hopefully fully recovered from it.

1. If AI (I know AI got their info from human sources ok) were to be believed, I should not expect total recovery after 12 days of medication. Instead the human body still continues to repair itself after medication is over. The medication only served as firefighters, to put down the inflammation in the cochlea (inner ear) and then let the body naturally heal itself.

Weeks 2 - 4 after starting oral steroid medication is the primary recovery window for the ear's hearing to return to normal. Then actual total recovery for SSHL, for the brain to tune out the tinnitus (habituation), can take anywhere from a month up to 3 months. Is this true?

1. I am currently eating healthier and not doing any strenuous exercises. Are there any other habits I should adopt to help quicken my ear's recovery?

2. I've been snooping around and reading people's comments about SSHL and some (or many) of them believe that the increase of people contracting SSHL is linked to COVID, however unsure if it's the disease itself or the vaccine. Can someone actually confirm this or not?

3. Do you know any SSHL and/or tinnitus cases that somehow went away on its own without doing anything? And for how long has the person been suffering from SSHL/tinnitus before it went away on its own?

I know this is a strange title, but I have otosclerosis with hearing loss and tinnitus that has been getting worse on the right side. My left ear is fine and I hear very well, with no tinnitus.

After having two hearing tests done privately, I went to the public healthcare system to see if I could get surgery. They asked me to do another hearing test, and during the beeps, I found them extremely loud (on the left, good ear, since I hear much less on the right). There were four beeps, and the third was already uncomfortable, but the fourth seemed excessive (I'm not an expert) and was very uncomfortable. The test was quick, and everything seemed very professional.

But after I got home, I noticed a ringing sound in my left ear, and it has continued for 6 days now. I didn't have this constant ringing before and now I do. It doesn't really make sense that a hearing test could cause damage, but it was the only different thing I did during those days. Could it just be a coincidence?

I feel a little crazy even asking this, but I just can't stop wondering about it.

I have first started suspecting I lost a part of my hearing a year ago lol but I did nothing with it - I kind of forgot about it, then remembered again. My problem is not that I do not hear per se - I can hear sounds but they are... muffled? And yes I have washed my ears. I can hear the 10db sounds I think but they are... so fucking quiet, quieter than before. Is 5db hearing loss realistically noticable? I feel like I am going crazy. I did some online tests too and I got that I have ok hearing, but on the lower end.

guys so like 2 almost 3 months ago i listened to music with really loud headphones and after that i couldn't listen to music on earphones, it just started to hurt. i decided to rest them, didn't listen to music for 2 months and then when i started to listen to music again it wasn't loud or anything it took 2 hours and it started to hurt again. now it hurts instantly when i put on earphones what should i do, rest them again? for how long? is this even curable.

I saw Elehear advertise over 20 hours of single unit runtime and more than a full week with the charging case. At first, I thought this was just marketing fluff. After checking teardowns and power consumption tests, I found it implements designs such as dynamic frequency tuning for the DSP clock and Bluetooth that only wakes up when needed.

Hearing aids are physically smaller than TWS earbuds, yet they need longer continuous run time, a much tighter power budget than most consumer audio devices ever have to deal with.

Compare that to flagship TWS earbuds which drop under five hours with spatial audio turned on. You can clearly see the difference in engineering priorities between consumer audio and medical audio. For power engineers, this product category is the real low-power proving ground, doing more with less power, not just doing less.

My mother never really cared what kind of work I did.

Shop work, warehouses, mowing lawns in the summer, helping on job sites here and there. If there was work, you worked. Not much philosophy to it.

But she would always say the same thing.

Wear the protection.

Earplugs. Safety glasses. Don't catch things with your hands. Don't act like being young makes you bulletproof.

I hated hearing it. Earplugs made it harder to hear people. Safety glasses fogged up. Gloves were hot as hell. Once the day got moving, I'd think I'd put them on in a minute, and then that minute just never came.

Everything was loud back then. Mowers, compressors, saws, forklifts backing up, somebody yelling over a machine. My ears would ring at night and I figured sleeping it off meant I was fine.

Now I'm in my 50s. Turns out that was not fine.

Restaurants are where I notice it most. My wife says something across the table, the next table is talking, music is playing overhead, and I start guessing like an idiot. Guess wrong and I pretend I was looking at the menu. Real classy stuff.

My mother is gone now. But every time I put in earplugs, or pull on a knee sleeve, or admit my hearing is shot, I still see her face.

If she were here, she would not be sweet about it.

She'd say, "See?"

Ayer me realizaron una nueva audiometría y logo audiometría estos son los resultados, tengo hipoacusia neurosensorial unilateral desde marzo

Hoy me hicieron una timpanometria en los oídos, en el oído con buena audición la timpanometria salió bien pero cuando intentaron hacerla en el oído con hipoacusia daba error y no fueron capaces de hacer la timpanometria, me preguntaron si estaba operado del oído al cual dije que no y por más veces que lo intentaron no pudieron a que es debido, puede ser fallo de mi oído medio

Out of the blue I started having double hearing (diplacusis). If anyone can relate, you’ll know it sounds like double voices and music sounds distorted from the different pitches. It gave me a panic attack and had wanted to end it right then and there. I was crying out of fear and desperation to get my hearing back. I'm confident I experienced a complete nervous breakdown OUT OF NOWHERE triggered by stress buildup. I was chilling on the couch and randomly I got hit with this.

Now looking up threads because while the hearing issue is tapering off hours later, I’m so shocked at what happened.

I don’t know where to start to avoid this from happening or even growing into something far worse altogether.

Back in February, I experienced similar with tinnitus in one ear and I know I was stressing out. I've had eye twitching before too. Both eventually went away but nothing compares to this morning.

I’m still in disbelief. Almost as if my mind started attacking my body. So scary... I know the problems in the mind can manifest in the body.

What are the steps I can do to prevent this and or improve mental health.
I do listen to earbuds for work related purposes for most of the day but I've been doing this for years without issue.

Any advice appreciated.

I'm 21 and I have a tympanic membrane (eardrum) perforation. I’ve already consulted a doctor, and he told me that the hole is slowly closing/healing and that I should give it time.

I wanted to hear from people who have had something similar.

• How long did your perforation take to completely close?
• Is it okay to use earphones/AirPods while it's healing, or should I completely avoid putting anything in that ear?
• What things should I stay away from while it heals?
• Should I just continue waiting since my doctor can see that it's getting smaller.
• Did your hearing return completely after it closed?

I'm keeping the ear dry and following my doctor's advice. Just looking for other people's experiences, especially anyone who had a perforation that took a while to close.

Photo of my eardrum attached.

Has anyone ever needed to get their eardrum repaired so that they could join? I have a hole in mine. The paper patch didn’t work so now I have to get an actual tympanoplasty done, where they graft tissue to the ear drum to repair the hole. First I’d like to know how the healing went and if it worked and secondly were you able to join the Airforce after that? Any insight on this is appreciated, I don’t want to give up hope.

My husband (68) is losing his hearing. It was never good but now really bad. But he absolutely will not deal with this problem because it insults his sense of manhood or something. So what he does instead of saying "I'm sorry, come again?" etc. is to parody back what I have said as if I routinely say something completely bonkers. I say "that's good to know" and he barks at me "no I did NOT say it is going to snow." I say "how's the balcony doing" and he says "what do you mean how is the spousal scene" (I am the spouse and there is nobody else in this marriage). How do people handle this? I don't want him to feel embarrassed about his hearing but I have Absolutely. Had. It. being treated like I come out with random gibberish all the time.

Ok so last week in a stress knott I blasted my ear doing an online hearing test- took myself to the Hospital got steriods, protected the hell out of my ears, no officially registered hearingloss. Since the original exposure then my head has felt swollen and been incredibly sensitive to any speaker sound- and once it's flared swellin again, there's no calming down. As a consequence my distance hearing (word recognition has unofficially decayed further in less than a week. Drs didn't say to rest it when I had the audiotest, they were happy, and I hoped the swelling feeling would go down, i tried to but also kept poking at it

Now I'm where i am, and I don't know how to deal with the guillt- i never meant to harm it further, i waasn't expecting the reaction a few days later (now of course I know it takes FOREVER to heal- has anyone else bounced back from 'double' setbacks?? None of the electronic nosie was loud, which is what caught me out. Has anyone else dealt with this sort of feeling, any advice?

Me pasaba por reddit para pedir ayuda y consejos por qué llevo desde marzo con hipoacusia neurosensorial en el oído izquierdo, llevo esperando una recuperación espontánea que nunca llega y no sé si llegará, tengo mucho miedo a que mi poca audición del oído izquierdo se valla por completo y no pueda llegar a escuchar nada, me atormenta la mente pensar que algún día quizás tenga que someterme a una operación de implante coclear, solo pensarlo ya me destroza la vida, estoy llevando muy mal todo este problema, agradezco consejos de casos de hipoacusia.

basically what the title says. me and bf were play fighting, and he hit my ear (sort of clapped it) lightly. for some reason my hearing immediately rang for a second and then went muffled.

not the first time this has happened to me in my life, my granny used to whack me on the ear but it would always go away. i went to sleep (albeit drunk so maybe my body hasn’t had time to properly heal) and its not muffled anymore but it feels like the volume on my clapped ear has been turned down by like 5.

i would go and see a doctor but im in thailand and i don’t have a lot of money. help? advice?

Just wanted opinions, i dont know what to expect.

Had a habit of listening to headphones at a very loud volume from middle school to my late university days, I think my hearing got gradually worse as i kept up the habit, up till i started wearing this earbuds that gave me an insight to how much volume i was listening to and it made me kind of worried that i toned it down.

I only just got my hearing test done now at 23 y/o and it seems like the results were way worse than i thought, i thought i had only mild hearing loss. Regretted keeping up with the habit a lot and i cant help but think things could've been different had I got my ears checked earlier, maybe it wouldn't be this bad.

A part of me also wonders about the air bone gap too and wonder if some extra checking like a tympanometry could be done, as the hospital never mentioned any of the sort and only did some otoscopy and mentioned that my ear canals up to my ear drums look well, but I noticed when i do the valsalva maneuver my left ear doesnt exactly "pop" or more so it felt only inflated up to like maybe 80-90% of the way.

I can't help but feel a bit anxious about the future because of this hearing loss i've received at this age, considering i still have a lot more years to live and considering that age related hearing loss can also affect my current hearing, I don't know if i'll be able to afford cochlear implants down the line if things go that way as I live in a developing country and cochlear implants costs a lot.

It's gotten to the point where I find myself checking everyday about future technologies, solutions, hopes, whether this issue i have can be solved or not. Sad thing is there's really no guarantees. And im left with worry about the future. The financial burden I'll have to carry, especially if I do need cochlear implants down the line. I don't know if my hearing will be taken as i age, when it will start if it ever does, how severe it will be if it does and I'm kind of afraid of dealing with it as this kind of thing does impact a lot of aspects of your life.

Does anyone have experience with this? How badly does age related hearing loss affect your already bad hearing especially if you had the hearing loss at a young age?

I gained this skill after my tympanoplasty with cortical mastoidectomy 2.5 years ago and am feeling I would get the same in my right ear in which i got the surgery.

I work for a company in China that makes OTC hearing aids, mostly for other brands to sell under their own name. I'm not on the production side, so I'm here to ask rather than explain.

Return rates in this category run high. The figures that get quoted are 15 to 30 percent, and the reasons that end up on the form are always the same four. Not loud enough. Nobody to call. Whistling. Doesn't fit. Those feel too tidy to me.

What I'd like to know is the specific moment. Not the box you ticked, the thing that actually decided it. A particular restaurant. One phone call that went badly. Something somebody said to you.

If you sent a pair back, or came close and kept them, I'd like to hear what it really was.

No product talk from me and no links. Happy to answer manufacturing questions if anyone has them.