Even though I was born with perfectly normal hearing I am now far from it. As an infant, and even to this day I suffer from chronic ear infections. By the age of two I was using my first set of hearing aids to help make up for my sensorineural hearing loss. As time went on and my hearing continued to diminish, from mild, to moderate, and now sever to profound hearing loss, my hearing aids quickly became too weak to work for me. I am currently on my fourth set of hearing aids, the most powerful that exist as of now. To deal with the excess wax build up from various ear infections I’ve had tubes put in and taken out too many times to count. After twenty ear related surgeries,one of which being a skin graft to reconstruct my left eardrum after it didn’t heal on its own once the tubes were removed, I gave up counting. Due to the reconstruction of the eardrum and the large amount of scarring from tubes, I now have permanent conductive hearing loss on top of the temporary conductive hearing loss due to occasional excess wax during bad infections and the permanent and continuous sensorineural hearing loss.
For the vast majority of my life local audiologist as well as specialists at the Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary were baffled as to why my outer hair cells just kept dying. It
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The hair cells gradually die down the basilar membrane from base to apex. Today the highest 40% of frequencies normally perceived by humans are completely dead and gone. As for the remaining 60% I have some degree of hearing left, but the threshold of hearing has been considerably altered. Some frequencies lie 90 dB above the normal human audibility curve. The perception of this loss is similar to getting taller; you never wake up one day with a sudden exaggerated change in your world view. You don’t realize it’s happened until years go by and you have an epiphany that something so familiar used to seem so