Age: 23.0
Sex: F
Vaccine: COVID19
Symptoms: Ear discomfort, Fear, Interchange of vaccine products, Nausea, Otitis media
Clinical narrative: On the Saturday following the date I got the Moderna booster shot (having received the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen shot earlier this year on 3/8/2021) I had sudden change in my left ear's hearing. It is hard for me to describe how it sounded but it was as if I could no longer hear low-frequency sounds easily. But overall on the first day, my hearing was much worse. It felt as though my head wasn't the right pressure, like when ears pop due to elevation change. My right ear remained unchanged throughout this entire experience.  I waited a few hours before telling anyone as I expected it to fix itself as this had happened to me before for minutes at a time, returning to normal fairly quickly after the onset. However, at 7pm that night I started to feel pretty worried, and started telling my friends I was with about it, and looking into what could cause it- after reading a pre-print academic paper discussing incidence of sudden hearing loss after receiving a COVID vaccine, and seeing that the paper discussed it occurring to the case studies in the paper within three days of getting it, I got a bit concerned, though I'm not about to insist it's the vaccine that did it. I discussed it with my doctor on the next day, Sunday, she said she wasn't quite sure what to tell me as she hadn't heard of it being a possible vaccine reaction, and assured that most reactions, if this is one, should go away on their own over time; she told me to get my ears examined at the student health service, which I did.  My hearing suddenly returned to normal on the following Monday morning; I had started to acclimate to the change in hearing and so I was a bit surprised and didn't really know for sure if I was fooling myself or if it was better. I got my ears examined at my campus's student health service around 5pm on Monday, just to be sure. I explained everything I'm talking about here to the woman who examined them, and she said that other than my left eardrum looking somewhat retracted (which she said would indicate middle ear inflammation, perhaps), they looked entirely fine; no impaction, no earwax build up, anything. She said I should just wait and see what happens and come back if they get worse- luckily they have not gotten worse, and my hearing has remained entirely normal since, I've not noticed any differences in my hearing compared to prior this event. But it was very scary.  Something I think I should mention also: I tested positive for COVID-19 this past summer, on 08/03/2021. Prior to that I had never experienced any form of dizziness, ever; when I was dealing with COVID symptoms however, after losing my taste and smell for about a week or so, the last COVID symptom I experienced was intense dizziness. It was so bad I could not leave my bed without feeling that I was about to vomit. I took over-the-counter Meclizine to treat the dizziness and it went away soon after, having not reoccurred. Even when I had this hearing loss, I did not get dizzy. But given the dizziness from that COVID infection was from middle ear infection, I do wonder if it's somewhat related, if this hearing loss was caused by inflammation as well.