The Hills alum Lo Bosworth is opening up about her recovery after undergoing inner ear surgery.
“I had surgery on my inner ear yesterday and the recovery has not been as easy as I thought it was going to be,” Bosworth, 39, said in a Thursday, September 10, Instagram video. “So, I have otosclerosis, which means that the tiny little bones in my inner ear have fused together and, for sound to be sound, those bones have to vibrate and not to be fused together.”
According to Bosworth, she experienced drastic hearing loss over the last several years that “got way worse” during her pregnancy with daughter Nelle. (Lo and her husband, Dom Natale, welcomed their daughter in January.)
“My ENT [doctor] told me it was going to get worse in pregnancy, but oh my gosh, oh boy, did it get way worse in pregnancy,” she recalled. “I’ve been wearing hearing aids, the whole deal, but you can get surgery for otosclerosis. It’s called a stapedectomy, and I was under the assumption a little, tiny ear surgery was going to be not a big deal.”
Bosworth, who had prosthetic stapes implanted in place of needing external hearing aids, has found that the first 24 hours post-op were “pretty rough.”
“They put you under general anesthesia for a stapedectomy because they need you to be perfectly still, and I think waking up from general anesthesia can be really tough,” she acknowledged. “It was really tough for me yesterday, my blood pressure was really low afterwards, so [doctors] were really worried.”
Bosworth also felt dizzy and nauseous while the medical team worked to increase her blood pressure.
“I felt awful. I had a really rough last night coming on,” she added on Thursday. “The biggest thing when you have inner ear surgery is that all of your balance can go wonky for a couple days … while you recover because the fluid in your inner ear is all out of whack or something and there’s so many tiny nerves in your inner ear that affect your taste and just how you experience the world.”
She continued, “Every time I close my eyes I get vertigo. I have to sit for a minute with my feet on the floor to try to get the liquid in my inner ear to balance because then I have to hold onto the walls when I’m walking because I’m so dizzy and have vertigo.”
Despite the difficult recovery, Bosworth remains hopeful that the procedure was a success because she is “trying to improve [her] lifestyle pretty dramatically.”
