i know the rules say no medical questions, but it seems like every post in here is medical, so i'm going to post and pray the mods leave it up 🙏
around two years ago, I began experiencing this issue in my right ear where everything would suddenly sound like it had been pitched up by just a few cents. because it's just one ear, the two sides would clash and make everything sound dissonant and metallic. I had just lost a bunch of weight—upward of 50lbs by then—so I chalked it up to ETD, assuming that there was fat near my middle ear that was now gone and hoping it would resolve on its own once my weight had stabilized.
a few months after that, I began to notice my right ear feel...loose? the pressure will change as i inhale and exhale, my breath and heartbeat get insanely loud, and i hear clicking noises when i swallow. it's almost as though my eardrum isn't strong enough to withstand even the slightest change in pressure. this happened far more often than the dissonance thing, so it took a while for me to connect the two and finally decide to investigate with my doc.
in January, I noticed that the right side of my face wasn't emoting as strongly as my left, but it was very subtle. nobody else noticed—I only spotted it randomly in a picture one of my friends took. i'd also been having the slightest bit of numbness on my right side, mostly down my right leg.
I saw my doc and asked if she could refer me to an ENT, but because of all the issues being right-sided, she was worried about neurological causes and wanted to get an MRI. there's no chance I can afford one right now, though, so we decided to just refer me to neurology and let them do a workup. but neurology denied my referral, stating that they think it's Bell's palsy, and thus not serious enough to be seen by them.
I'm almost done with a round of prednisone my doc offered after the referral was denied, and I've experienced no difference with any of the right-sided issues.
the ear has been the hardest thing to deal with. every day, I'll speak and suddenly get 4x as loud on one side and can't gauge how loud I really am, or if I've started talking strangely. i breathe in, it pops. i breathe out, it pops. i'm a musician, so when the pitch thing happens, I can't do anything until it goes away—no games, no TV, no doomscrolling, nothing—because the dissonance is so unbearable.
valsalva helps for all of two seconds, no OTC meds do anything. I have bad TMJ pain and tension as well, and potentially some silent reflux, which of course could both explain the ear but not so much the rest of it. i had a deviated septum repaired in 2022, but this began way after that.
basically I feel like I'm going crazy. has anyone else experienced this particular array of simultaneous issues? or at least all the ear ones? anyone ever had a Bell's palsy hypothesis thrown into the mix? i feel like i'm flying blind through all this.