A New Way to Hear

It happened rather suddenly.

We had just moved to Beijing, China, where my husband had been transferred for his job with the State Department. I was still getting used to a new house, a new language, new foods and new friends. I wasn't feeling well, but I figured it was just morning sickness—I'd recently discovered I was unexpectedly pregnant with my fourth child.

I was giving my then-15-month-old daughter a bath one night, wondering why they call it morning sickness when it seems to strike at night. I bent over to pick her up from the tub, and that's when it happened.

My ear made a popping sort of sound, and the room started to spin. I put my daughter in her crib, then went to bed myself and tried to sleep, wondering what had happened and when it would pass.

By morning I couldn't get out of bed. I was so disoriented that even shifting my eyeballs caused a wave of nausea. When I finally managed to stand, the nausea sent me staggering for the bathroom. I could hear nothing out of my right ear.

At the local hospital they hooked me up to an IV and peered into my ears. It was a puzzle. My ears were clear, so that meant there was no infection, and my temperature was normal. But I was deaf in one ear, nauseated, dizzy and scared.

They sent me home that afternoon with antinausea meds and a diagnosis of "sudden deafness syndrome"—which could have been caused by various problems, none of which was detected in me. They recommended I follow up with an ear, nose and throat specialist, but all of the ENTs were out of town for China's five-day National Day celebration. It would be at least a week before I could see one.

After a few days of intense sickness, during which I almost never moved from the couch, I was medevaced to Hong Kong by the State Department, as the ENTs in Hong Kong are supposedly better equipped to handle such emergencies. I kissed the kids goodbye, promising to return in three days. But three days turned into a month, as I was evaluated by various ENTs and an obstetrician, who gave me an ultrasound to make sure that the baby, eight weeks in gestation, was still growing safely inside of me. I had an MRI to rule out brain tumors and ultimately endured four shots of steroids, administered directly into my eardrum.

The shots were the only hope I had of restoring my hearing, according to my ENT, and they work in only about 30 percent of cases. So I sat still for each painful shot, then went back to my hotel room and held the phone to my right ear, pressing buttons randomly in the hope that I'd hear something other than the buzzing—a byproduct of deafness—that had begun to take over my brain.

But the shots didn't work. After a month in Hong Kong, during which the nausea slowly subsided but my hearing didn't improve, the doctors determined there was nothing they could do for me, and I returned to my family in Beijing.