As assistant professor of piano pedagogy at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory, the ability to hear is critical to Chris Madden.
Each day, he listens intently to his students play and perform works on the piano, helping to fine tune their skills. His listens to the notes with detail and for clarity, providing valuable feedback in their learning process. He also enjoys listening to his own playing of the piano, which he picked up at the age of 13.
“Starting at that age is relatively late compared to my colleagues,” said Madden. “No one in my family was particularly musical, but piano was something I wanted to do. I even paid for my own lessons to start out!”
But last fall, Madden woke up one morning not able to hear out of one of his ears.
“I thought it was a clogged ear from congestion,” said Madden, who didn’t think much of it at the time. But that changed a few days later. “I was biking downtown and couldn’t hear a city bus passing by me on my left side. I knew something was very wrong.”
Doctors diagnosed his condition as idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing, commonly known as sudden deafness. “I was devastated,” said Madden. “The first thing I thought of was how am I going to teach like this?” said Madden. “I just started at UMKC two years ago and then something like this happens.”
His type of hearing loss is rare – about 1 in 5,000 are diagnosed each year according to the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Doctors believed Madden’s case was caused by a virus. His physician prescribed steroid treatments and shots, along with sharing the odds that only 10 percent of people regain their full sense of hearing.
“My doctor kept emphasizing with this diagnosis, every day counts,” said Madden. “With each person I talked to, I’d say, ‘I don’t know if you can get me in today, but here’s what I do for a living. I work at a conservatory and hearing is my life.’”
Researching his treatment options, he connected with North Kansas City Hospital and its hyperbaric oxygen therapy, called HBOT. The treatment involves breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized environment. It’s a well-established treatment for scuba divers suffering decompression sickness, but has also been effective in treating hard-to-heal wounds and other health conditions such as sudden hearing loss. Within 24 hours of calling NKCH, Madden was undergoing treatment.
For 20 days, he received a two-hour-long HBOT treatment. He compared the chamber to an MRI tube, with one distinct difference. “The chamber is pressurized to 65 feet below sea level so my ears were popping quite a bit adjusting to that.”
Slowly – and fortunately – Madden’s hearing started to return. It wasn’t immediate, but by the end of his treatment, all hearing tests were back to normal. “My cell phone is finally back to the lowest volume,” said Madden.
“When my students play the piano now, I sit there and think it’s just nice to hear normal sounds again, because it wasn’t like that for a few weeks there.”
“When my students play the piano now, I sit there and think it’s just nice to hear normal sounds again,” said Madden. “Because it wasn’t like that for a few weeks there.”
Madden credits his recovery to the combination of his steroid therapy and HBOT, along with his ability to get treatment so quickly. And he encourages others to act fast when facing urgent changes in your health – something he also emphasized when sharing his story with KSHB TV-41 and North Kansas City Hospital.
“You really have to advocate for yourself,” he said. “If it feels urgent, go straight to the doctor and say, ‘This is an emergency!’”