Thanks to a medical prowess, a 40-year-old regains hearing and facial motor skills

Rediscover the pleasure of hearing, listening to music or the radio in the morning. Arnaud, a 48-year-old farmer, regained his hearing thanks to a medical feat. In 2020, while tinkering, a hot piece of metal lands in his left ear. He becomes deaf and his face is paralyzed. Until this operation in 2021: a world first carried out at Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris. The hospital has just confirmed the success of the surgery, which is very complex.

A medical feat

Indeed, two nerves hide in the ear, one allows us to hear, the other to move our face. In this 48-year-old patient, both were damaged, which is rare. After a first operation, the patient finds neither the hearing nor the motricity of his face. So, in the spring of 2021, two surgeons are trying to combine two sensitive techniques during the same operation.

“Facial paralysis, we rehabilitated it by cutting the part of the nerve that was burned and we replaced it with a nerve that we took from the neck”, explains Ghizlène Lahlou, one of the ENT surgeons who participated in the operation. “For the hearing part, we have put in place an electronic implant which allows the sound to be transformed into an electrical signal. It is this electrical signal which will stimulate the hearing nerve”, she adds to the microphone. Europe 1.

Today, the patient hears perfectly and has regained expressions he had lost for almost three years on the left side of his face. This operation also eliminated the tinnitus from which he suffered since his accident.