Middle-ear disease

Daniel, 20, was bullied at school, mostly by frustrated, busy teachers and despite being sent for re-education about Daniel's illness and hearing loss, the bullying continued.

His home-room teachers, each year, would authoritatively inform me he was not really hearing impaired and that he was just trying to trick them, because his fluctuating hearing loss meant that he could hear sometimes, but not all the time.

The invisibility of hearing loss can create stigmas for kids in school and they often get branded as troublesome.

These early, daily school experiences establish their lifelong patterns of poor self-esteem and poor educational outcomes from unsuitable learning environments.

Long-term glue-ear can cause multiple forms of hearing loss, some temporary, some permanent, and all fluctuate depending on the challenges present, like background noise.

The build-up of pus and mucus in the middle-ear impairs the hearing, and can burst your ear drums, which also causes some loss.

You can also get a subtle and tricky fluctuating loss from auditory processing disorder (APD) which is hard for others to detect and understand, and even harder to get properly diagnosed.

Long-term middle-ear disease also breaks down the little bones in your ear and a permanent loss in addition to other forms of hearing loss is likely.

Kids with glue-ear hear more efficiently when a speaker is facing them, but as soon as the speaker disappears from their line of sight it is far less likely that they will be heard.

Retention of anything that is heard, especially long, detailed dialogue, is very difficult.

APD slows the link between the ears and the brain and is not unlike the seven-second delay on talkback radio.

However, by the time APD sufferers have heard and understood what has been said, it has l-o-n-g passed and they've missed everything since then and cannot catch up without capturing lessons on a voice recorder to play back later.