Hyperacusis and muffled hearing nightmare
Around mid-December 2023, a friend and I went to attend a live gig during which I experienced pain in my ears due to extremely loud sounds coming from the speakers to which I was exposed without wearing hearing protection. Being unable to tolerate the situation, I was forced to leave the venue.
Initially, however, I did not experience any hyperacusis/acoustic trauma symptoms. As soon as I got out, I felt better, and thought this would be the end of it. And yet, some damage had been done. Indeed, some days later, I experienced a sudden sense of dizziness/vertigo while listening to the music with my headphones, followed immediately after by increased sound sensitivity which I've come to associate with hyperacusis. All sounds started to feel extremely loud, and I soon found myself forced to wear hearing protection throughout most of the day.
Scared like hell by this new acquired condition, I booked a visit with my ENT, who suggested I could have indeed experienced acoustic trauma and suggested I took a cycle of corticosteroids. I followed his advice, but after one week my symptoms stood the same. At that point I started to independently search for solutions on the internet. Having read that Gabapentin could indeed help with some cases of hyperacusis, I managed to get a prescription from a psychiatrist and started to experiment with it. Luckily, I largely improved by the beginning of the new year, so that around mid-February 2024 my hearing was almost 'back to normal', although I still noticed sensitivity to loud sounds (> 90 dB) and continued to wear hearing protection whenever attending live gigs/going to the club/going to the cinema.
The situation remained stable until mid-March 2024. Then, almost two weeks ago, I went to the club but forgot my ear plugs. As soon as the music started playing, I had a sudden threshold shift and everything started to sound muffled, especially in my left ear. I immediately left the venue, hoping that this was going to be only a temporary condition - like in other cases of 'temporary threshold shift'. Unfortunately it was not. To this day, I haven't been able to reacquire 'normal' hearing. Basically, I feel like my head is in a bubble, and I haven't been able to enjoy music anymore, as everything just sounds like a noisy mess. Adding insult to injury, this sort of 'deafness' is accompanied by increased sound sensitivity, so that if I try to push the volume of my TV/phone/stereo, I feel discomfort.
Fearing I had done permanent damage to my ears, I immediately started another cycle of corticosteroids and I decided to book a visit with my ENT in order to test for hearing loss. To my great surprise, pure-tone testing and tympanometry came out 'fine'. I have perfect, almost 'super' hearing according to my doctor, and he has absolutely no clue why I feel like I do. Although he was not so straightforward, I am pretty sure he believes my symptoms are purely psychosomatic and that my deafness is 'in my head', not 'in my ears'.
Now, although I am no medical professional, this 'explanation' is not entirely satisfactory to me. I am honestly starting to struggle to cope with this entire situation, with everyone around me just telling me that 'eventually it will go away' or, even worse, that's 'all in your head'. But in fact, it all feels very real. Everything sounds 'flat' (like I'm missing some frequencies), and I struggle to process sounds when they overlap in complex ways with one another (like in some musical tracks with heavy distortions).
After having done research on the internet, I have started wondering if I suffer from 'hidden hearing loss', which would help explaining many of my symptoms. Yet, to my understanding, this is not a so-well-known/well-studied condition, and there are no 'standard' testing procedures to diagnose it.
What do you think? Has any of you with a history of hyperacusis ever experienced such 'sudden' deafness following unwanted exposure to loud sounds? How long did it last? Have you ever recovered? Are there any remedies that you would suggest?
Thanks in advance to anyone replying