P and Hearing Loss
from Globehead

Hi Ed.  Enjoying this website, I am!  Learning lots and laughing fit to bust.  After teaching 7th and 8th graders all day, I need a good, REALLY good, laugh every now and then.

Regarding the hearing loss possibility:  During the last 10 years, I have been accused of having "selective hearing."  As I have observed over time, when my psoriasis and arthritis "blooms," I limp and cannot hear a certain ranges of sound. Voices seem to disappear at times.  I have begun to read lips and insist that my students face me when they speak.  Even then, I must get close to them.  With my scaly eyebrows, my scaly ears, the snowfall from my head, my short hair-do, my scaly elbows, etc. they start backing away, so I still cannot get a clear communication.  A couple of the kids have tacitly turned into "translators" and repeat at close range for me.  A couple of them also have taken over the job of listening to announcements from the PA system at school and repeating them for me.  Bless them.

Some of the kids are very kind and laugh WITH me, the others laugh at me.  You know that I know that you know the difference.  Not much respect for decrepit granny with skin condition, bad limp, weird hairdo, funny clothes and shoes that don't hurt.  As long as I can keep laughing...

Anyway,  when the skin returns to almost normal (takes the particular area or joint about two years to leave the acute state and go into just-nagging state), the hearing improves. Anti-inflammatory meds help sometimes. Makes for an interesting lifestyle.   The crone moans. (And cackles.)  (Just in time for Halloween.)

Bye for now,  keep up the good work.  Feels good to not be alone. –Globehead

*****

Ed’s Response:  Ah!  We need to bottle your world view, Globehead.  It should put a good dent in Prozac’s market share.  You possess IRO (intelligent and realistic optimism).  Frosted, of course, with humor.  I wish you had been my eighth grade teacher.

Until yours, it had been quite awhile since I’ve received email about P and hearing.  Maybe your situation will strike a chord and we’ll hear (no pun intended) from others.

My hearing isn’t what it used to be, either.  Tinnitus is one of my problems (ringing in the ears).  My GP has told me this may be caused or exacerbated by high cholesterol; but since we’ve brought that down the noise hasn’t seemed to subside (and I’ve found no other references associating this ailment with high cholesterol).  In my college years I was an audiophile and learned through pursuit of my passion (high fidelity sound systems) that my high frequency sensitivity was well below normal for my age.  Now, with Tinnitus hitting me in my early 50s, here’s another indication that my hearing is aging faster than normal.  Does any of this relate to P?  I don’t know.  There’s some anatomical correlations to consider.

One, lesions in the ear have been known to effect hearing but mostly indirectly, by clogging the canal with flakes reinforced by ear wax (that compound — wax + flakes — must be good for something other than diminishing our hearing ... a new waterproof adhesive, perhaps?).  Blockage like this will interfere with high frequency perception before low frequency perception (for the same reason the boom-boom-boom from your neighbor’s hi-fi woofers — bass speakers — is more annoying than the soprano voices in that rock band).  But in my case, I was losing my high frequency hearing two decades before I started to flake.

Two — and this is a question, because I’ve read or heard nothing about it — might the bones in the inner ear be susceptible to P or P-arthritis?

Keep the kids laughing WITH you, Globehead (aka Mars B.).  I look forward to hearing (no pun intended) from you again, soon. -Ed

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