This is how Grace Ann Pensiero is finally getting relief: breathing pure oxygen inside a pressurized chamber. The 47-year-old is undergoing hyperbaric therapy after waking up last month in pain, and deaf in her right ear.
"I thought, honestly, I thought I had a brain tumor because of the symptoms of extreme nausea, extreme dizziness, unable to walk," said Pensiero.
Doctors diagnosed Pensiero with a viral infection. She lost hearing and hope before visiting a specialist in hyperbaric medicine.
Dr. Owen O’Neill oversees the largest hyperbaric chamber in the northeast at Phelps Hospital in New York.
Patients breathe compressed gas which pushes two and a half times more oxygen into the body’s tissue, speeding up the healing process.
"Over the course of 20 to 30 treatments, we may be able to grow new small capillaries to make up for what the hearing apparatus has lost," said Dr. O’Neill.
A new report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association confirms hyperbaric therapy combined with a steroid treatment improves the likelihood that patients will recover some of their hearing.
Each treatment lasts 90 minutes. Typically, patients have to come here five days a week for four weeks.
Pensiero is already hearing improvements. "The first time I was able to hear the beep, I screamed and I said: 'I can hear it!'"