FWIW, nearly 40 years ago I was told that my right ear, the one affected my Meniere's at that time, was not aidable, due to recruitment. Bicross aids were mentioned as a POSSIBLE solution--not a sure one. Of course, aids have improved greatly during the past four decades, so that makes sense. My trigger is abnormally low hormone levels; it took four years to learn what the safe combination of hormones is. Once I started mega doses, crises ceased and I was able to begin VRT to combat balance issues. I slowly cut back on the hormones as I was in my 40s at the time. For the past 30 years, I've been taking relatively small doses of hormones, but enough to keep the Meniere's monster at bay.

Four years ago, my good left ear had age-related deafness to the point that I went to Costco, had tests, got an aid for that ear. which did help hearing...until two years ago, when I went bilateral. (I think I had cut back too far on the hormones, but that's just what I think, not what anyone knows for certain.) Most of the time, I couldn't tolerate wearing the aid in my good left ear, due to recruitment--loud/sharp sounds were very painful. As a result, I was close to totally deaf. For a year, I tried to find a local doc willing to prescribe large doses of the correct combo of hormones. When I finally did, within two weeks of mega doses of hormones, hearing returned to the level it had been in my left ear and the recruitment was far, far less so that I could tolerate the aid. I'm still taking large doses of hormones, although less than half what I took for a brief period of a few weeks.

A couple of months ago, duh, it dawned on me that perhaps, if the recruitment in my good left ear was far less, perhaps there was less recruitment in my long useless right ear so that I could try wearing an aid in it. Went back to Costco, asked for a hearing test. The test confirmed that recruitment in my right ear is far, far less, so not quite a month ago I bought a pair of new aids (which cost slightly less than the single aid I'd bought four years ago!). Wow! I still have issues understanding speech, but I can hear things I haven't heard for decades! What a thrill! No longer need to check the gauges to confirm that I've turned my car on, or walk the length of the kitchen to feel if the dryer has finished. Better yet, tinnitis is now pretty insignificant, and I haven't had a single aural hallucination (where you hear things that clearly aren't present). The big machine in the space under my bedroom disappeared, no longer runs every night! If I hear the coast guard helicopter, I know where it is in the sky...for the first time. I'm still getting used to how noisy the world is! The next step is to find a speech pathologist, which the Costco tech says is like doing PT for understanding. All extremely good!

Meniere's is so difficult to diagnose correctly, plus there's no sure-fire treatment for hearing loss. (VRT definitely IS the treatment for balance, and I went back to the vestibular clinic for a refresher course in balance exercises, as 35 years ago VRT was in its infancy. Nothing really new, just a reinforcement of the things I need to do to continue to use proprioception instead of vision to balance. Because I've done some VRT every day for decades, I didn't have terrible new balance issues, although I learned that I have some age-related nerve damage in my lower legs that means I needed to add some new routines to my daily life, the big one being to walk at least half of the quarter-mile distance to our mailbox on a gravel road with eyes closed. Fortunately, no one lives along that stretch to watch me veer off to one side at times! While doing that, I think about what my feet are telling me and have learned to "feel" where there's more loose gravel, i.e., the edge of the road. Life is good again!