Info requested from MD's & pros w/similar issues
-
I've been diagnosed with profound (not nerve damage) hearing loss in right ear, severe loss in left. Also, retinoschesis (sp?) In both eyes. Any advice? BTW, I'm 70 & my only goal is to play the hymnbook well enough that people want to sing along. Estevao (Stephan)
-
@Estevao I guess the porch light's on but nobody's home. Oh well, my question was a forlorn hope I guess. Ciau.
-
@Estevao said in Info requested from MD's & pros w/similar issues:
I've been diagnosed with profound (not nerve damage) hearing loss in right ear, severe loss in left. Also, retinoschesis (sp?) In both eyes. Any advice? BTW, I'm 70 & my only goal is to play the hymnbook well enough that people want to sing along. Estevao (Stephan)
It is hard to give advice without knowing the diagnosis causing the deafness. Here are the causes of deafness:
Viral infection of cochlea/auditory nerve:
Inflammation of cochlea/auditory nerve
Syphilis
meningitis
Encephalitis
Acoustic neuroma (vestibular schwannoma)
Other cerebellopontine angle (CPA) tumorsThen you state that this hearing loss is not related to nerve damage. I am guessing this was based on a evoked response EEG study? If in fact, the neurological pathways were determined normal, this leaves only these possibilities:
Sludging due to hyperviscosity
Polycythemia vera
Macroglobulinemia
Leukemia
Accelerated coagulation
Arteriosclerosis
Aneurysm of anterior inferior cerebellar artery
HypothyroidismNot knowing whether imaging studies had been ordered to rule out microvascular disease, whether bone marrow sampling has been performed to look for leukemia causes, or if lipid profile, coagulation or thyroid function tests have been performed makes it very difficult to provide advice at this phase. Obviously, best focused advise would to focused around treating the underlying cause.
-
Thnx for the reply. The hearing loss is due to a congenital defect in eustachian (sp?) tubes causing retracted tympanum, childhood severe middle ear infection, & selected frequency loss from factory work. Have had middle bone transposition and tympanoplasty in teens. Mastoid infection & cholesteatomas as adult led to a mastoidectomy on right.
My question wasn't clear. How do I deal with hearing loss as brass player? Hearing aids change instrument sound quality, magnify ambient noise. How do other brass players deal with such loss from either medical or musical perspective?
Also, how do sight challenged brass players deal with reading music scores? I play what I see but cannot differentiate spaces vs lines at times.
BTW, my wife doesn't like it when I DON'T practice and even my cat tolerates it, so I'm not playing to a tough audience.
Thnx again.
-
@Estevao My eyesight is pretty poor anymore. I wear +5.0 contacts just for walking around, and +1.75 cheaters to read. My solution to reading music was to scan it all and put it on the biggest iPad I can get, in ForScore. With aggressive cropping, and also extensive cleanup - often pixel by pixel - to get rid of smudges, smears, schmutz that others can ignore but which my eyes take longer to recognize and disregard. I can get a remarkably clean and legible sheet out of a very nasty, crufty scan, and about 125% larger than if it was on a clean page. In some cases our original paper was the result of a scan of a scan of a photocopy of a copy of a copy and compared to that I have a few that are closer to 175% of original.
I also turn the brightness on the screen all the way up. Really helps.
THEN you also have the option of turning it sideways and viewing half a page at a time. You have more page turns, and it will be harder to read very far ahead, so you will want to make use of the Links feature to help with jumps, possibly even in repeats and certainly in dal segno and coda jumps.
