Cold Drops Into the Brain

A needle through the eardrum is almost painless. It is what comes after that is strange. And the hardest part was not the needle at all.

There is a treatment for sudden hearing loss that sounds like something from a horror film and feels, oddly, like almost nothing. They put a needle through your eardrum and inject steroids directly into the middle ear. I had it done. And the strangest sensation of my life was not the needle.

Let me describe it, because when it was coming, I could find almost nothing that told me what it would actually be like, and the not-knowing was worse than the thing itself.

You sit back. They numb the eardrum as best they can. Then the needle goes through, and here is the surprise: it barely hurts. A pressure, a small strange pop, and it's through. Your eardrum, that thin private membrane you've protected your whole life without thinking about it, is pierced, and it is almost gentle.

Then comes the part I still remember with a shiver. The cold liquid goes in. And because of where it is, deep in the head, it doesn't feel like a drop in your ear. It feels like cold falling directly into your brain. A slow, spreading, icy sensation somewhere behind and inside, in a place you have never once felt anything before. Your body has no map for it. There is no word for it. Cold, in a room of yourself you didn't know had a temperature.

I did that, and more. Sixteen steroid pills a day. Injections in my ear. Injections in my backside. A body turned into a pincushion, throwing everything medicine had at a problem that would not move. I held on to each treatment like a lottery ticket.

This one. This will be the one that brings it back.

The result, after all of it, was nothing. The hearing did not come back. Miss T did not leave. That was the first real slap of this whole thing: the discovery that you can do everything right, endure everything, hope with your whole chest, and the answer can still simply be no.

But here is the part that matters most, the reason I'm telling you about the needle at all. By the time I had the injection, I had waited too long. The window I wrote about last week had mostly closed. I will never know for certain whether doing it faster would have changed the outcome. Maybe not. Sudden hearing loss keeps its own counsel. But I do know that I let precious time pass, idolising calm doctors and waiting to feel better, and that the injection which might have had a fighting chance in the first days was instead a long shot by the time I finally had it.

That is the message I would send back to the man on that bathroom floor in December 2015, if I could send only one thing. Not “it gets better,” though it does. Not “you'll cope,” though I have. Just this: do the injection now. Not in a week. Not after another opinion, another wait, another hope that it passes on its own. Now, while now still means something.

I don't write that to frighten anyone already living with the aftermath. If your window has closed, as mine did, the injection is not where your life is decided, and I promise you the story does not end at that no. It gets better. Not easier. But better. I'll spend most of these pages showing you how.

But if you are reading this in the first days, ear ringing, world spinning, a doctor telling you gently not to worry, then this essay has one job. To be the voice that isn't calm. To be the friend who says: I know it's terrifying, I know you want to be told it's fine, but move. Ask for the treatment now. Cold in the brain is a very strange feeling. Regret is a colder one, and it lasts a great deal longer.