The story of Shirley
In 1990 I had had several tumors in my right ear area and had surgery that removed my ear canal, ear drum and just about everything else except the actual cochlear, then my right ear was sewed closed and I become a one-sided hearing person. That was okay. February 23, 2014 I was still that one-sided hearing when I went to bed that night but on February 24, 2014 I woke up to complete and total silence. Could not hear a sound. It is a syndrome called SSHL (Sudden Senerinual Hearing Loss) which normally happens overnight for no known reason. It can happen to one or both ears causing one-sided hearing, which I already was, or total deafness, which I am now. I had a cochlear implant June of 2014 on the left ear which allows me to hear sound but not words and they think it’s because no sounds whatsoever comes in on the right ear and I cannot have a right ear cochlear implant or a middle ear implant because of the previous surgeries in 1990. March 18 of this year (2016) I am going to have a fairly new procedure with a Sophono Implant on my right ear which is an implant device placed behind my right ear (definitely less intrusive than the other implants) that will capture sounds sending them through the skin to my cochlear. Hopefully, it will be enough sound to allow me to hear again. Going completely deaf overnight is rare and has been hard to adjust to like in a silent world. More research needs to be done on SSLH.