BY JAVIA HEADLEY, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS
“I was having coffee with my buddies like I do almost every morning. . . when this dog barks right in my ear. My friend said it looked like I had been shot.”
That instant, seemingly mundane to an outside observer, irrevocably altered the life of actor Jack Coleman. One moment, he could hear clearly. The next, the once-familiar sounds of life became distant echoes, as if he were submerged underwater.
Across the table from him at a sunlit cafe in Sherman Oaks sat Nora McGarry, listening intently. She knows the feeling all too well. Her hearing loss came gradually, then all at once, culminating in a year of total deafness in one ear before complex surgical reconstruction at the House Ear Clinic brought sound back to her.
At first glance, it was not easy to discern the connection between Coleman and McGarry that would unveil itself in the conversation that followed. Coleman, best known for his roles as Steven Carrington in the popular 1980s soap opera Dynasty and Noah Bennet in the science-fiction drama Heroes, has a career that spans decades in Hollywood. On the other hand, McGarry is the Director of Major Gifts and the Grateful Patient Program at the House Institute Foundation, where she connects grateful patients like herself to the groundbreaking work we do in transforming hearing health.
Over coffee, they reflected on what it feels like to live in a world where hearing is assumed, where losing it can feel like fading into the background, and where research holds the promise of something more than just treatment. One day, it could mean a cure.
Nora (second from left)
Nora (third from right) on her wedding day
Jack Coleman in Heroes
AN UNLIKELY CONNECTION
Coleman and McGarry’s paths may never have crossed had it not been for their hearing loss, but as they spoke, their similarities piled up.
Both were born in Pennsylvania. Coleman was born in the east, right on the New Jersey border, and McGarry in Wilkes-Barre, where her father’s sales and marketing job had briefly taken the family before they returned to their native Los Angeles.
Coleman’s passion for acting led him to New York shortly after finishing his college career. There, he starred as Danny Zuko in Grease before landing his first television role on Days of Our Lives. That job brought him to Los Angeles, where he soon found himself on the set of Dynasty, one of the most iconic television shows of the 1980s.
Meanwhile, McGarry had unknowingly been watching Coleman on Days of Our Lives as a child. Later, when her husband spent a year abroad in Holland, she would write him letters detailing what was happening on Dynasty. She was completely unaware that one day, she and Coleman would be sitting across a table from each other, sharing their experiences with hearing loss.
Ultimately, their most striking connection was that, despite differing diagnoses, they both found themselves at the House Institute receiving treatment from Dr. William Slattery.
A SUDDEN SILENCE
For Coleman, hearing loss arrived with little warning. While rehearsing with friends in a celebrity band, he noticed a pain in his ear. The next day, the aforementioned dog bark changed everything.
“I had some [hearing], but it was all as if I was underwater. And that can make you suicidal,” Coleman admits.
Desperate for answers, he visited an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist, who prescribed prednisone. That did not work.
He soon found himself in Dr. Slattery’s office, receiving intratympanic steroid injections.
“It’s a scary-looking implement,” Coleman says, describing the needle that bypassed his eardrum to deliver the medication directly to his inner ear. According to Coleman, the procedure was quick but jarring.
First came the numbing, which Dr. Slattery assured him wouldn’t hurt. “And I went, ‘Ow! That hurts,’” Coleman laughs. Then came the pressure. “And I went, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a lot of pressure.’”
Finally, the dizziness hit. It was intense but mercifully brief.
While Coleman never regained full hearing, the treatment alleviated the unbearable sensation of being underwater. “That made life livable,” he says. “I can live with diminished hearing. I could not live with that.” Still, hearing loss infiltrates nearly every part of his life. He watches movies with subtitles, struggles to follow conversations in noisy rooms, and constantly asks his wife to repeat herself.“I’m definitely in need of hearing aids,” Coleman says. “I’ve known for a while, but now I’m at the point where the effort and the loss outweigh just being able to get by.”
Coleman is now taking the next step in his hearing journey. He will be receiving a new pair of hearing aids and the House Hearing Health Centers (HouseHearing.com). This technology will help him stay connected to the world around him, easing the daily challenges of living with hearing loss.
Photo: Nora, her husband, and her dog
REBUILDING SOUND
McGarry’s hearing loss journey was different but no less disruptive.
About 30 years ago, a cyst on her mastoid bone required Dr. Slattery to remove the bones in her middle ear altogether. For an entire year, she was deaf in that ear. She eventually underwent a second surgery to reconstruct the delicate structures that allowed her to hear.
As she is getting close to 60, McGarry decided to get her hearing tested again. Working at the House Institute, she had learned the startling statistic that one-third of adults over 60 experience some degree of hearing loss. Sure enough, she was losing sound in her surgically repaired ear.
Dr. Slattery identified that the hearing loss was due to scarring from the procedure 30 years ago. Just this past July, she went back in for another surgery.
“My hearing is so much better now,” she says. “I didn’t even realize I wasn’t hearing high-pitched sounds.”
Hearing loss, she explains, is often so gradual that the brain compensates in ways we don’t even notice. Directional sounds become unreliable.
“If I heard a sound behind me, I wouldn’t know where it came from,” she laments.
Coleman nods. He knows exactly what she means.
“It’s not just that you don’t hear things,” he adds. “It’s that you mishear things. You hear a word that someone didn’t say. You hear a sound from a direction you can’t identify. A dog barks, and you think it’s a car backfiring.”
A CURE WITHIN REACH?
Coleman has learned to live with his hearing loss, but what if he didn’t have to?
Right now, the only solutions for Coleman’s condition – sudden sensorineural hearing loss – are hearing aids and managing symptoms through strategies like Coleman’s steroid injections. At the House Institute Foundation, researchers believe a cure is possible.
The Hearing Science Accelerator (HSA), an initiative launched by Dr. Slattery, is designed to answer the biggest questions in hearing research, starting with sudden sensorineural hearing loss. “Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss affects typically normal, healthy individuals,” explains Slattery. “Out of the blue, they suddenly lose hearing in one ear; we don’t know why, and we don’t have good options to treat it. The goal of the HSA is to develop new treatment options for a cure.”
The Hearing Science Accelerator brings together top scientists, geneticists, and clinicians to lay the groundwork for breakthroughs that could revolutionize hearing health. These experts decided upon research objectives on the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of sudden sensorineural hearing loss at an in-person workshop in April 2023.
As their research continues, Coleman and McGarry are hopeful they will find a cure. “If they can restore hearing like mine,” says McGarry, “why not find a way to reverse sudden hearing loss?”
For Coleman, his dream is apparent.
“What I’d hope would come from research is a way of treating things so they can be fixed, not just helped.”
Until then, Coleman and the other 66,000 U.S. adults who will experience sudden sensorineural hearing loss this year are waiting for the day when this condition does not mean permanent loss of sound.
With the work being done at the House Institute Foundation, that day may come sooner than we think.