Thursday 26th Jan

In the night something changed. I was starting to hear something in my left ear besides the invented sounds of my stimulus starved left hemisphere. You couldn't exactly call it hearing BUT it was something. I excitedly put a earphone in my left ear and played some music. I heard nothing until the volume was around 3/4 full and then it was horribly distorted and unbelievably, totally out of tune. I tried not to think of what that might mean and clung to the fact that it was an improvement of sorts. I spent the morning rearranging my home studio so that the both speakers were to my right as I sat at the keyboards.I hoped this would enable me to work with only one ear as the left was proving to be more of a hindrance than a help. When I was in secondary school, my art teacher John Germain was an important musical inspiration to me. He would sometimes lend me LPs to take home and listen to. Because of a botched operation following an accident playing rugby, he was paralysed on one side of his face and totally deaf in one ear. He explained that he didn't ever listen to music using headphones because even with one ear, if the speakers were positioned right, he could hear the stereo image. I failed to emulate this trick. I don't know if it's something that can be learned but to me, wherever the sound came from in the room, it sounded like it was dead centre in front of my right ear. I could see I was going to have to take extra care crossing the road from now on. Music in mono is flat and one dimensional, difficult to understand, a challenge to listen to. I was really starting to worry about Monday. Marillion we planning to meet at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios then to continue working on the next album. I read a lot about SSHL and became something of an amateur expert on the possible causes and cures. It made for depressing reading. In the evening I went down the local pub but only stayed for half an hour because the noise was horrible in my left ear and I couldn't understand most of what was said to me.

Wednesday 25th Jan

I got a phone call Wednesday morning asking me to come to see the consultant that evening. My email had done the trick. I was elated and hopeful that he would sort me out. When I arrived at the hospital I waited less than five minutes before being called in to see him. I love the NHS. Who doesn't? If you live in the UK it's unpatriotic to say anything else. You could get tarred and feathered for breathing a word of criticism against anything our wonderful National Health Service do. The sad truth is, paying gets you a better class of health care. If you can afford private health insurance, do yourself a favour and get some. It could save your life or at least cut the amount of time you spend waiting to see somebody who can help you. My consultant was clearly intelligent, kind and knowledgable about his subject. All things ear. Unfortunately he didn't have great news. In a very nice way he revealed that we don't really know what causes SSHL and that roughly one third recover completely, one third recover some hearing and an unfortunate third learn to live with total deafness. There are a number of theories as to what causes SSHL, the leading contenders 1) a virus, 2) nerve damage and 3) obstructed blood flow are just a few but we don't really know what causes it. He said he could prescribe some drugs to help in the event that I had one or these but there was no real evidence to support this. On the other hand, they wouldn't do any harm. At that moment I would have pissed on a spark plug if I thought it would do any good so I said "yes please" One possible cause of nerve damage or restricted blood flow could be a tumour so he advised I should have some blood tests and a MRI scan too. Purely as a precaution. I agreed. Angie and I drove around Oxford at night looking for a pharmacy that was open and had all three drugs in stock. They were, steroids, an anti-viral and something called Serc. Things were looking pretty bad. I had another night of kettles and waves crashing on the shore in my left ear.

Tuesday 24th Jan

I had a disturbed night's sleep on monday. The tinnitus calmed down once things were quite but it was still enough to keep me awake once I woke up during the night. When most people experience tinnitus from noise damage it's usually a single high pitched note that drives them slowly mad unless they learn to cope with it and ignore it. Tinnitus from SSHL is a different sort of thing. It appears to be the brain's effort to cope with the sudden lack of sensory input from the damaged ear. Guardian journalist, Nick Coleman described it perfectly in a piece he wrote about his own SSHL. I've taken the liberty of quoting him here.. "I emerged from hospital a week later, profoundly deaf in one ear, my brain refusing to let my ear go quietly. Its reaction is to fill my head with noise. Imagine the sound of pressurised air escaping from a central heating valve. That's the sound that fills the right hemisphere of my head round the clock. Concealed within that hissy cloud there's another layer of far subtler sounds. In the dead of night, when my wife is breathing silently and there is no other sound going in my good ear, I can hear beneath the pfffff a strange polyphony of whistles and cries, like a drowning choir, accompanied by a tiny monkey playing a teeny pipe organ. It can be quite soothing. But if my wife suddenly exhales through her nose, or rustles the duvet by moving her head slightly, then all hell breaks loose. I hear gasping cats and boiling kettles. When two or more voices are joined together in amiable conversation, I hear trains entering underground stations. Right now, sitting at my computer in an otherwise silent house, the minuscule hum of the machine is at a pitch somewhere between the central-heating pffff and the cat's gasp. This is not conventional tinnitus, but entirely reactive to input in the good ear. It is the auditory equivalent of the illusion experienced by amputees - the feeling that the missing limb is still attached. My brain is generating sound to compensate for the lack of auditory activity in my ear." I have to say that his SSHL sounds much worse than mine, at least I don't have the accompanying loss of balance and nausea. Not wishing to give up on getting treatment I decided pay for private medical treatment. After doing some research I settled on trying to get an appointment with a ENT consultant based in Oxford, reputed to be the best around. I called his secretary and was told the next available emergency appointment was next Monday. A week? For an emergency? I booked it amyway and wrote him an email describing my situation, the fact that I was a professional musician, how my hearing suddenly failed, and would he consider seeing me sooner. Another day wasted. I was kicking myself that I hadn't seen a doctor in Thailand.

Monday 23th Jan

Monday morning I was up early, partly due to the time difference and partly due to the new noisy friends I had acquired in my left ear. I was rather amused at the strangeness and variety of sounds that only my left ear could hear. I would quickly grow tired of them but for now I was interested in this new phenomena and was still fairly hopeful that it was a temporary condition. I waited impatiently for the Oxford Hearing Centre to open so I could call and book an appointment. I, and the rest of the band had visited there around five years ago to have foam moulds of our ears made for our custom made in-ear monitoring systems. They are called Ultimate Ears but if you ask me, there is nothing ultimate about them. They cost over £600 a pair and sound pretty poor I my opinion. There is a room in the marketplace for a better in-monitoring system if anyone reading would like to have a go. Last time we went to the OHC I opted to have a hearing test. I recall the rest of the band choose not to on the basis that they didn't want to know what damage they have inflicted on their poor ears over the years. My hearing test was unremarkable, it showed some age related loss in the higher frequencies and a small amount of noise related loss in my left ear. This visit would be different. I spoke to a nice chap on the phone and he said I should come in straight away but not to worry, it was probably wax. I drove to Oxford in a hurry. I wasn't reassured by his "probably wax" over-the-phone diagnosis. When I arrived he was bright and breezy, asked me about my holiday and explained that ear wax was hydrophilic and expands on contact with water. The sea water mixed with the wax and made a solid plug in my ear. Simple. He swung the TV monitor my way so I could see as he stuck a camera in my ear. We both had a perfect view of my eardrum completely free of wax. That's the first time I had ever seen an eardrum and it looked like a delicate pink concave translucent membrane. I was fascinated that such a simple thing could be the conduit of everything we can hear from the highest whistles to the sub bass under the stage at our gigs. I was also struck by the change of demeanour in the audiologist who was examining me. He looked concerned as he whipped out an oversize tuning fork, banged it on the table and stuck it to the middle of my forehead. "Where is the sound coming from?" he asked. "Somewhat to the right" I replied. I didn't understand the significance of this test but he did and said we should carry out a full hearing test. Now. The tuning fork was conducting the sound straight through my skull to my inner ears. Had my hearing been normal I would have heard the sound in the middle. Barotrauma doesn't normally affect the inner ear but I was blissfully unaware of this at this point. He shut me in a booth and proceeded to send me a bunch of different frequencies through the cans and I became increasingly worried. Eventually he announced that I should go immediately to A&E because this was a medical emergency. Nice. I drove like a bat (with one ear) out of hell to The John Radcliffe Hospital. Spoke to Angie on the way trying not to cry as I told her what was happening. She came to meet me at A&E and we sat there for 4 hours as people came and went with various injuries from dog bites to burns while my "medical emergency" went unattended. It's true, I wasn't feeling any physical pain but it seemed that the more time passed the less that could be done for my broken ear. Eventually I was seen by a junior ENT doctor who said there was nothing they could do and that I should go home.

Sun 22nd Jan

Over the previous three days the hearing in my right ear returned to normal but my left ear was a different matter. Strange random noises started to replace my normal hearing. I became more concerned as the days passed but was reassured by reading about Barotrauma on the Internet, "the source of all knowledge" Unfortunately, the knowledge I was acquiring wasn't applicable to me. Barotrauma is fairly common amongst divers, according to the Internet, and is caused by water pressure damage to the eardrum or middle ear through failure to equalise pressure while diving. The pressure changes most in the first few feet of diving and a dive of 20 feet would easily be sufficient to cause the symptoms I was experiencing, or so I thought. The flight home was uneventful but I did have plenty of opportunity to use headphones and to my growing horror I realised I was completely deaf in my left ear. It's amazing how the brain can compensate for things. I knew the hearing in my left ear was bad but it was only when I put a earphone in just my left ear and nothing in my right did I understand how completely deaf I was. I was starting to panic.

Thursday 19th Jan

This all started on the Thursday the 19th of January. I was in Thailand, Khao Lak to be precise, with Angie my partner.it was our first holiday sans our 3 kids for 5 years and we were having a great time. We decided to go on a boat trip for the day to the Similian Islands. This included some snorkelling which I sometimes enjoy doing. I've done a bit of scuba diving in the past so I understand how to equalise the pressure in your middle ear while descending etc. It was late morning and I was about to return to the boat when I saw a green sea turtle swimming lazily along the bottom, at a depth of around 20 feet. I swam down to take a closer look. The turtle didn't seem alarmed so I approached it and I gently touched it's back and then swam to the surface. As I climbed onto the boat I noticed my ears were ringing and the high frequency ranges of my hearing were reduced. This felt exactly like the sort of thing you might experience after a night of loud music at a gig. Over lunch I noticed that I was having trouble making out what was being said which was a shame as the guy I was attempting to talk to happen to be from switzerland and a former bass player who at one time played with the Bee Gees or The Brothers Gibb as they were known in the 60s. Later on the boat ride back to the mainland I listened to Blackfield's Welcome to my DNA and although I recall some hearing loss it was by no means as bad as it would get over the coming days.

Why write about this?

I decided to write this blog firstly to keep some sort of record of my experience of the devastating condition known as SSHL or sudden sensorineural hearing loss. It's certainly not as devastating as terminal illness or the death of a loved one but, for a musician like me it's up there. Have you ever wondered to yourself, if you had to choose, would you rather be blind or deaf? Or if you had to choose between losing one ear or one eye, which would it be? I now know which it would be for me... The other reason why I decided to write this down was because I have told some people what's going on, close friends and family at first and inadvertently, last night via Twitter when I posted a message publicly that was meant to be private! Don't drink and tweet kids! I know that once the word gets out there will be a number of people wanting to know how it's going. Will I be able to continue as a member of Marillion in my new mono status? Well, the answer is, I intend to give it a bloody good go.