Preparing for Radiation: Visiting the Audiologist

 Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts. 

 After my annual brain tumor checkup in April we waited, somewhat anxiously, to hear back from my doctor about what the Tumor Board (the "Brain Trust" as we like to call them) decided about my future. I'm pretty sure that doctors don't feel nearly the amount of urgency in getting back to us as we do! On the 28th (my husband's 50th birthday) we finally received the results of my MRI in MyChart, something we would typically get a few hours later instead of 8 days. This told us that information should be coming soon, but the call we received was NOT the one we'd expected. The next morning, I got a call from Audiology. They were calling to schedule my baseline hearing test prior to radiation. Yep, that's the first time I heard from an official source that I would, indeed, be doing radiation. My surprise must have come across to the scheduler who asked if I was expecting their call, and I had to tell them, "No." My doctor's office must have put it into the system and got the gears rolling before they reached out to me, which happened later that day. The scheduler wanted to get me in first thing the next morning, but my husband had work that day and I asked if we could look for a Friday, his regular day off. They said those appointments were hard to come by, but when they checked, they actually had availability that Friday, so we booked it.

 

 Based on the fact that my doctor referred me to Audiology, I'm assuming she's considering radiation entering through the side of my head. This hasn't been confirmed yet as we won't have the exact plans until our setup appointment on June 2nd. From my reading, and what the scheduler shared with me, they are concerned about possible damage to my cochlea. The cochlea is located in the temporal bone, deep within the skull, and is relatively close to the brainstem and ventricles, which are what will receive radiation. If my cochlea is damaged by the radiation therapy, it can cause acute issues (right away) as well as long-term, permanent hearing loss. As a standard course of care, they run a hearing test prior to radiation of this type to establish a baseline - to see if I hear well to begin with. I guess that will give them something to compare it to later if I have issues.

 

 We arrived for my appointment early, as usual. It was kind of funny because it was in the same office in the hospital as my Neuro Ophthalmologist, they just use the other side of the waiting room, so I felt pretty familiar with the setting. That's where the familiarity ended though. When the technician, Jan, brought us back, she invited us into this little "booth" room. The floor was higher, the ceiling lower, it felt quite strange. And by felt I mean literally. The pressure was different in the room which made my ears feel like they needed to "pop." She started with a physical inspection of my ears, seeing if everything was visually intact, and then proceeded with an automatic hearing test. For this, she inserted a device into my ear canal that played sounds and measured their effect on my eardrum. It was basically an involuntary hearing test, the same type they use for infants to check their hearing, since they can't tell you if they hear a beep or not. Then she proceeded to run a few response-driven tests where she played "beeps" at different frequencies and had me say, "Yes" if I heard them. Next came word tests where she read a list of words, one at a time, that I repeated back to her. She also had me hear a male voice reading words to check for different tonal qualities. I passed with flying colors! There were a few frequencies of beeps that I couldn't hear, but I guess that's pretty normal.

Here's the Thing: So, there's something that normal about me! Gotta be honest, it makes me a little nervous knowing that radiation can impact my hearing, but in the grand scheme of things, I guess hearing loss, even deafness, is preferable to some of the alternatives that are likely if I don't do radiation.