hardofhearingchildren.com by PAM Candlish MLS
"What did you say?" "Eh?" "WHAT did you say?" "MM?" "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" oh "PARDON ME!"

Otoxic Drugs

Hearing Processes Damaged by Pills

Recognition of the damage done by some medications to the hearing nerve. If the pharmaceutical industry would compile honest records about side effects, we could begin to understand the complexities of why some or all people should not take that pill. There are medications out in the market which the vet won't use on dogs because of causing hearing loss, yet people are given prescriptions.

Drug-induced hearing loss is the focus of several chapters in Elaine Suss's excellent book When the Hearing gets Hard. Some drugs taken to fight an illness go through the kidneys and damage the hearing nerve. The problem is that to clearly understand which medications are not safe, our scientists must begin at the begining with honest compilations of studies.  

Another complication is when one is very ill and likely to die, a little side effect like being deaf is not considered as serious. Many times whe Reid was little, hospital employees at Sick Kids in Toronto would tell me how lucky I was that he was only deaf, compared to all those poor children who had cancer. Medically speaking, deafness is almost an unknown area of knowledge.

Several years ago, the summer was so hot the kids spent the days in the lake. Eventually some cousins added the thrill of picking up the lake bottom and throwing it at each other. To my horror, when Reid came to me for some personal attention, he had fluid dripping out of the ear canal in ( of course) his good ear. So off we went to Montreal to the emergency dept at Sick Kids Hospital. We saw the intern first. She did not use the otoscope properly. That should have been my cue to leave.(On a child the otoscope is used with the fingers curled to prevent the child from reaming his head and damaging the ear canal). Then the real doctor came in, and used the otoscope the same way the intern had. I suggested a tympanogram to see if the ear drum was ruptured. He replied that the machine was in the ENT department and it was unecessary. The doctor's method of diagnosis was to pull the childs' ears for five minutes to see if it caused pain. Then the intern was allowed to pull the child's ears for five minutes. I suggested Reid was stoic when it came his ears because of all the getting the wax out time in his life. 

The doctor prescribed little drops to go in the ear canal. Little poisonous drops, as it turned out. As soon as we put the drops in his ear he complained of a funny taste. His ear  drum was ruptured and the medicine was going through his ear to his sinus to his mouth. The ear drops were ototoxic, and only meant to be used in an ear canal that was intact.

On the following Monday I pulled strings and took him to CHEO in  Ottawa where he saw the ENT, had a tympanogram and a microscopic examination of the ear canal. A pressure dressing was used in the ear canal, plus antibiotics for the middle ear infection which was now roaring. Reid's threshold was raised to the top of moderate for almost a year after this demonstration of medical incompetence. I keep the vial of drugs with my audiology books to remind myself to never again accept substandard care and do what the doctor says.