London - Imagine being able to hear everything that’s going on in your body, as if through a stethoscope.
The quickening of your heartbeat. The blood coursing through your veins. Your brain wobbling in your skull. Even the swivelling of your eyes in their sockets.
Then imagine not being able to turn those sounds off. Ever.
Well that was the daily torture for Julie Redfern whose hearing became so acute it amplified sounds that are normally never heard.
She had to give up dining in restaurants with friends because she couldn’t hear a word they said over the sound of her own chewing.
Mrs Redfern, 47, also had to cut out crunchy foods like apples and crisps because of the deafening noise in her head as she ate.
Her job as a receptionist became an ordeal because when the phone rang on her desk the vibrations would make her eyeballs audibly shake. But after seven years of suffering she may finally be able to cut out the sounds thanks to pioneering surgery to plug up her acute hearing.
Mrs Redfern from Padiham, Lancashire, said she first noticed the condition shortly after her 40th birthday as she sat playing the computer game, Tetris, and heard a strange squeaking noise as she followed the bricks from side to side, before realising it was her eyes.
She said: “I remember it like it was yesterday. I was playing on the game and I thought ‘What’s that noise?’ – then I realised that it was my eyeballs. Every time the block moved and I followed it with my eyes I could hear them squeaking. It was a horrible sensation, I could literally hear them moving, scratching, it was very weird.” When her husband, Martin, came home she asked him if he could hear his own eyeballs.
She said: “He looked at me very strangely. I thought I was going mad. I started asking people if they could hear theirs but no one could.
“The doctors just said ‘It’s your age, when you get to 40 these things happen’. I thought I can’t put up with this forever, I knew something wasn’t right. I could hear things that were louder than they should have been, I could hear myself swallowing and my voice echoing.
“Everything moving in my head sounded as though it was swishing away. I would be stood in the queue at the supermarket and I’d start to sway, I felt drunk without having a drink.” Eventually she read about a man who was suffering from the exact same symptoms she photocopied the article and went to her doctor.
She was referred to Manchester Royal Infirmary where she had a scan and was told she was suffering from superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS).
SCDS is a rare medical condition of the inner ear caused by a thinning or honeycombing of a bone in the ear, which causes over sensitivity to sound.
Dr Gerald Brookes, a consultant neuro-otologist and skull base surgeon at the The Harley Street ENT Clinic in London said: “Some people may be born with missing bone, or very thin bone, which ‘dissolves’ with increasing age or may be damaged by a blow to the head.
“The condition was only recognised relatively recently in 1998. Patients may complain of various odd and seemingly bizarre symptoms, and may even be considered to be suffering from a possible psychiatric ailment until the true diagnosis is made.”
Mrs Redfern said fluid was leaking from the superior canal in her ear and turning the bone into a honeycomb that amplified sounds in her body.
She said: “The surgeon opened me up like a book just behind my ear and described the inside of it like honeycomb instead of being like cinder toffee because of the holes.”
Then, during a complex five-hour operation which carried the risks of deafness, the surgeon had to fill in the holes on the bones to stop the sound travelling through them.
Mrs Redfern said: “Even though there were risks I had to have it done, I couldn’t have coped with it for another forty years, seven was enough.”
“After having one ear done she is now aiming to have her second ear operated on which will hopefully lead to a complete cure. I know when I have the other ear done I’ll be cured,” she said. “But you never know I might miss not hearing all these strange little things.” - Daily Mail