As usual, we had an interesting month at TAI. As you can tell from perusing the next section's blogs, we weren't the only ones concerned about earwigs and other critters in ears last month -- it was a hot summer topic. Before we get to this month's topic, we want to clear up a misunderstanding.  All patient comments reported here are real!  Several people assumed the "take a cold shower" comment last month was something we made up to be funny.  Au contraire -- our patients are much funnier than we are, as we'll discuss in a minute.

But first, we'd like to call your attention to a serious topic that can be overlooked, to the detriment of some patients. Ototoxic refers to all sorts of things that are toxic to the inner ears of humans.  We bring up ototoxicity because of a new report this week that a treatment for COPD has joined the list of medications that may cause hearing loss (Just click on the link underlined in this sentence to read our post on that new research). There are a number of ototoxic medications on the market, used to treat a number of serious health conditions.  Sometimes, as in the case of cancer treatments, the health concern trumps hearing concerns. In other situations, pre-existing hearing loss in a patient may prompt consideration of treatment with drug alternatives that are not ototoxic.  Challenging treatment decisions are always in the hands of the treatment physician and the patient.  Our job as Audiologists is to ensure that patients and physicians are aware of ototoxic characteristics of medications, and to initiate serial audiometric testing for any patients who must undergo treatment with ototoxic drugs.  

And now back to our patients. Communication is our business so we are intrigued, if not chagrined, when communications with our patients go awry.  This happened last month in a series of very confusing phone messages between Holly, Sharon, and our patient Marjorie.  Holly left a message for Marjorie informing her of a schedule change because "Sharon has jury duty scheduled."  Marjorie left a worried message back "hoping that Sharon would pull through."  This confused Holly, who did not know Sharon was ill, or had such a dread of jury duty.  Sharon denied both and left another message for Marjorie, who by now was worried to death about Sharon.  Eventually, the confusion cleared when we learned that Marjorie heard the original message as "Sharon has surgery scheduled." Now, Holly's working on diction and Sharon's working on Marjorie's hearing aid-telephone interface.

We've had many word confusions in our practice over the years--the worst was when a patient heard she had a "terminal illness" when we'd said she had "trouble hearing this." Wow, Holly really needs to improve her diction!  If you have further examples of misheard words and confusion, please send them in and we'll report them here.