Russ—so sorry to read this. But don't lose hope. As the miraculous homeopathic cure sandthemall describes shows, strange things can happen.
Three years ago, I was flying home from Prague on a plane with a shrieking infant right behind me. But those hours of torture were only the beginning. Thee days after getting home, both my wife and I came down with high fevers and ear aches; we guessed that baby had been sick and was shrieking in pain. Anyway, two days after that, I woke up with almost complete deafness in my left ear. I couldn't hear my fingers rubbing the outer ear, couldn't hear fingers snapping, a very disorienting sense of space, etc. My doctor prescribed oral prednisone, but sent me to an audiologist. He did a test with headphones that diagnosed a profound loss in that ear; he then did the test direct to the bone, which indicated the same loss. He told me this meant the damage was to the auditory nerves, and that it was not due to a blockage in the ear canal that felt like the cause. He called the condition "sudden idiopathic hearing loss" and explained that "idiopathic" meant no one knew what caused it—and that, accordingly, no one knew how to cure it. He suggested injections of prednisone into the eardrum (no, thanks!), or an expensive experimental treatment called a hyperbaric oxygen chamber that insurance would not pay for and that carried a risk of explosive immolation (again: no thanks!). In any case, he assured me that my hearing wasn't coming back.
But I didn't believe him. For one thing, I had a sensation of stuffiness in that ear that seemed to indicate a blockage which might clear. And, in fact, within a couple of weeks, I did occasionally swallow deeply enough to briefly clear the ear canal (or whatever it was), restoring partial hearing for a few moments. And then...gradually...I got almost all of my hearing back. Now, three years later, my left ear measures almost as well as my right; I'm back to being able to hear water dripping from three rooms away.
The lesson, I guess, is not to lose hope, and not to assume medical science has all the answers. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it should be that. Human physiology is astoundingly, confoundingly complicated and—to paraphrase the doctor from the old TV show "Northern Exposure"—the human body is a miraculous self-righting machine. Hang in there, and good luck!