AVENTURA, Fla. – Every year more than 65,000 Americans are impacted by sudden hearing loss which can happen in a matter of hours or over the course of several days.
In many cases, hyperbaric oxygen therapy can help patients recover.
David Irizarri has been playing the guitar since he was 12-years-old.
The thought of not being able to hear the sounds he loves never crossed his mind until one day at work when he started having problems with his left ear.
“It felt like it was clogged couldn’t hear anything, so I went home took some decongestants. I thought I must just have a clogged ear called it a day and said nothing to worry about,” he said.
The following day Irizarri realized something was clearly wrong.
‘I was in a meeting, so picture sitting at a boardroom style table having a meeting and I can’t hear out of one side of my head. I can’t even tell who in the room was talking to me,” he said.
Irizzari promptly got in to see a specialist who recommended hyperbaric oxygen therapy which is approved for sudden hearing loss.
“It gets oxygen to the organ, and it gets the oxygen in there and the oxygen exchange allows the hearing to come back,” said Judy Newman, director of HCA Florida Wound Healing Center.
Newman said the sooner the process is started, the better the outcome.
“When you change someone’s quality of life and you can see it on the test the doctor circles. It’s like what an improvement,” she said.
Irizzari underwent 21 sessions, which, start to finish, took at total of two hours each.
While it was a big commitment, he said it was time well spent.
“The moment I knew it was getting better was when the doctor took the tuning fork, held it up to my bad ear, and I could actually hear it which the first time that simple test it was like there was nothing there. I was told my eyes lit up when that happened because all of a sudden, I’m hearing again,” he said.
It’s not always clear what causes sudden hearing loss and while it can occur at any age, it most often affects adults in their late 40s and early 50s.