It was at the end of 4th grade, the first day of summer, when I was in the pool and doing lots of somersaults in the water. When I got out, I had water in my left ear. I tried to shake it out, hopping on one foot and tilting it toward the ground, but my ear still felt clogged. This had happened before, so my mom and I didn’t think that much about it and figured it’d go away on its own. Two days later, after my ear still felt clogged and we were on a family vacation, my mom called our doctor’s office. They recommended an earwax kit to help unclog my ear. We tried it twice but it was still the same. Then we went in person to see the pediatrician, who diagnosed me with Eustachian tube dysfunction. The doctor said it’d take three to five months, all summer, for it to unclog. My mom says we kept going to the doctor, to two other pediatricians in the practice, who all said the same thing—just to wait. And then finally in September my mom wanted something to change. She says she realized I couldn’t hear out of my left ear because when we were at synagogue she spoke to me in my left ear, and I turned my head all the way around so I could hear out of my right ear instead. My sister had an ENT (ear, nose, and throat specialist) because she broke her nose that year. I went to her ENT, and he immediately sent us down the street to see an audiologist. That’s when we learned that I have a hearing loss in my left ear.
A Meaningful Mission We had to do lots of tests for a year to make sure there wasn’t some other medical issue, like a tumor. When I got an MRI I remember there were wildfires going on and it smelled like smoke in the room. I was missing so much school for these tests that I didn’t want to go anymore, so we scheduled the appointments for evenings. In addition to hearing tests every three months, I also had genetic testing but it didn’t reveal anything. I don’t really remember this but I was exhausted every night, too. I wasn’t sleeping well because of my ear. The doctor said my sleep was probably being affected from my brain having to work so hard to hear all the time. At night I just couldn’t quiet my brain down after all the effort of trying to hear, so I wasn’t falling asleep easily. It really worried my parents. Eventually my mom started preparing me for the 32
hearing health
hhf.org
photo credit: gina logan
By Abe, with input from his mom
