The Day I Lost 40% of My Hearing

Three years ago this month, I lost 40% of the hearing in my right ear.

I woke up with a cold and thought my ears just needed to pop. Just your average Utah-in-October cold where your nose is stuffy and your ears feel clogged. Eventually the cold went away, but my right ear never popped. You know that feeling after swimming when there’s water trapped in your ear and you keep trying to get it to open? That’s exactly what it felt like.

After about a week, I was getting really annoyed. I eventually called my primary care doctor, and he told me ears can sometimes take a few weeks to clear after a cold and to be patient.

So I waited.

I already had some hearing loss and wore hearing aids, so I even tried turning up my right hearing aid to compensate. I tried every trick in the book and just kept waiting. Which was actually a huge mistake

Three weeks later, I was getting ready to leave for New York to film a big campaign and decided I couldn’t take it anymore. I booked an emergency appointment with an ENT. In my mind, I was going to walk in, have him pop my ear, and be home 45 minutes later.

Instead, they told me I needed a hearing test. I remember being confused. Why would I need a hearing test? I just needed my ear popped. I videoed all of this in real time on my Instagram stories too. Do any of you remember this? It was awful.

After the test, I sat there waiting for the doctor to come in, and for the first time I felt a little fear creep in.

What if this isn’t just my ear needing to be popped?

That was the only forewarning I had.

Then the doctor walked in and ripped off the Band-Aid: “Abi, you have idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss.”

I was totally thrown. Ammon didn’t fully grasp what he was saying either. We just stared at each other dumbfounded, and then I lost it.

Everything after that sentence went quiet. Figuratively and literally. The doctor kept talking, but I wasn’t hearing any of it. Eventually I understood what he was telling me: I had suddenly lost a significant amount of hearing in my right ear, there wasn’t an obvious reason why, and there was a chance it wouldn’t come back.

I sat there in that silly high chair and bawled. I am so grateful Ammon was sitting next to me.

Then we went into fight mode.

My ENT made it very clear that we needed to move quickly, especially because I had already spent weeks thinking my ear was simply clogged. Very quickly my calendar filled with treatments: oral steroids, steroid injections directly into my ear—which are exactly as delightful as they sound—and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

The next morning, I arrived at the hospital at 7 a.m. needing an X-ray, EKG, bloodwork, a pulmonary test, a physical and approval from multiple specialists before I could begin hyperbaric treatment. Thankfully, everyone helped fast-track me. By 4 p.m., I was approved and did my first treatment that same day.

The next day, I flew to New York for work. I was tempted not to go but this was one of the biggest career opportunities of my life. I was filming for a huge project and I couldn’t let it pass me by. Looking back, I don’t think I had time to process what was happening. I just kept going. Appointment, treatment, filming, steroid injection, another day, another appointment.

When I got home from New York, I resumed hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Every day I drove an hour to the hospital, spent two hours in the chamber, and drove an hour home. You can’t bring anything into the chamber. You can watch a movie through the glass, but a lot of those hours were spent with nothing to distract me.

At first, my prayers were simple:

Please bring my hearing back.

But as the days went on, they started to change.

Help me understand what I’m supposed to learn from this. Help me know how to be okay if my hearing doesn’t come back.

I started thinking about other people who were suffering and how small my problem seemed compared to some of the things people carry. Not because that made what I was going through hurt any less. I didn’t want to talk myself out of being sad or pretend I was fine. I tried to feel all of it—the fear, the grief, the hope—and still ask what I could learn from it.

I stopped trying to control the outcome. I stopped trying to control anything and everything in the situation and just lean in. I had done everything I could do. I had taken the steroids, gotten the injections, climbed into that chamber every day and prayed for my hearing to return. At some point, there was nothing left for me to do but let go and trust God with what happened next.

When everything around me turned down, Heaven turned up.

I felt God very close to me during those weeks. And I began to understand that faith wasn’t believing God would give me my hearing back. It was trusting that I would be okay even if He didn’t.

And ultimately, He didn’t.

I regained a little of my hearing, but nowhere close to what I lost.

I would still choose to have my hearing back. Hearing loss is hard. I miss things. I ask people to repeat themselves. Conversations in loud rooms take more work. If I want to hear someone, I have to look at them, pay attention and actually listen.

In a strange way, losing part of my hearing has made me a better listener. Not just to other people, but to myself and especially to God.

There is one other reason I keep telling this story. Since sharing my hearing loss online, I have received so many messages from people who have experienced something similar, and I cry reading a lot of them. One of the hardest parts of my own experience is knowing that I spent weeks thinking I was waiting for a clogged ear to pop.

So if there is one practical thing you take away from my story, let it be this: If you experience sudden hearing loss—or suddenly wake up with an ear that feels clogged or won’t “pop”—don’t assume you should just wait it out. Seek prompt medical evaluation. If it turns out to be nothing serious, wonderful. But sudden changes in hearing deserve to be checked.

Three years later, hearing aids have made a huge difference in my life. I currently use Earlux hearing aids and genuinely love them. I also documented this entire process on Instagram while I was living through it—the appointments, treatments, hyperbaric chamber and all the emotions that came with it. I saved those stories in my highlight called “my ear 👎” if you want to see what those weeks actually looked like.

Three years ago, I walked into an ENT’s office expecting him to pop my ear. I walked out knowing part of my hearing might be gone forever.

I would take my hearing back in a heartbeat. But I can’t change what happened, and I don’t want to miss what it gave me either.

I lost part of my hearing, but I learned how to listen.