On Things That Refuse to Die

The past month has been excellent. There was a trip down to NC for the weekend, there was House of Cards, there was a fun second-round interview in Baltimore, there was much theater, there was much mock trial, and there were many snow days. The more interesting of these things are covered in Kelsey's blog.

I feel that I have a duty to continue reporting on the status of my ear on this blog, though, because some day the story will have some sort of ending. That day is not today. 

On February 11th, I got the go-ahead from my ENT to get another audiogram. I was not hopeful about it, since I didn't notice much of a change in my hearing from before the surgery. Of course, this entire issue arose because I didn't notice ANYTHING about my hearing before this past summer, so "things I notice" isn't exactly the most trustworthy of tests. 

So, just to recap: in August (and presumably from then until December 31st), the hearing in my left ear was fine but the hearing in my right ear was strangely not-fine.

Left ear- fine. Right ear- not fine. 

The numbers on the Y axis reflect how much louder a sound had to be (at each frequency represented on the X axis) for me to be able to hear it like a normal person. You can see it varies from 20 decibels (a whisper-volume louder) to 40 decibels (something between a whisper-volume and a normal conversation-volume louder). I failed my hearing test for the Navy due to the little circle under 2K that sits at 40. Every other number was okay. 

So, let's compare these results to the numbers that I got back from my appointment yesterday:

Left ear- still normal. Right ear- the high frequencies remained the same and the low frequencies took a crash. The takeaway from this is that my right-ear hearing is now back in the "normal" range and is no longer considered "mild hearing loss." I was surprised, but I'll go along with it.

So, theoretically, if I took the hearing test now for the Navy, I would pass. That said, they would have to LET me retake the test and possibly give me a waiver (the thing that they are not fond of giving me) for the surgery that I had, depending on how you categorize it. Given how the process has played out so far, I am not getting my hopes up. Part of me even hoped that I would fail my audiology exam yesterday so that I would have closure on the issue. But that did not happen, and that is the story of how my Navy JAG quest continues to stubbornly refuse to die.