I'll take a speculative stab as to how this happened. There are two extremes of equalizing your air spaces.
Equalizing cleanly and equalizing aggressively.
I have a feeling you equalize aggressively which put undue stress on your middle ear, which led to your acute deafness.
Take a plywood door as an analogy. If you open and close that door very gently and smoothly, it will look clean, undamaged, and as sturdy as the day you built it.
Now if instead you always turned the handle and kicked the door open, well eventually you'll see cracks and heavy damage start to show.
With diving, some methods of equalization are very aggressive and rough. The Valsalva maneuver is one of them. While you can clear cleanly with the Valsalva maneuver, you can also overpressurize your middle ear with excessive force. You can also force air past a block with this method, and most likely what happens is you break past the block and overpressurize; very violently I might add.
On the other hand with the Frenzel Maneuver, your range of overpressurization of your middle ear is much much smaller than the range that you can do with the Valsalva. You can break your eardrums with the Valsalva, you cannot do that with Frenzel. Frenzel is a lot less forceful than the Valsalva and takes more care to timing your equalization before you feel pressure from depth.
The BTV/VTO method is at the far end of this spectrum in that you cannot possibly ever overpressurize your air spaces, as it is a passive equalization method. There is absolutely no stress put on your middle air from the act of equalizing when you use this method. I believe personally every diver should work up to this method.
[Beance Tubaire Volotaire/Voluntary Tubal Opening]
Equalizing cleanly and equalizing aggressively.
I have a feeling you equalize aggressively which put undue stress on your middle ear, which led to your acute deafness.
Take a plywood door as an analogy. If you open and close that door very gently and smoothly, it will look clean, undamaged, and as sturdy as the day you built it.
Now if instead you always turned the handle and kicked the door open, well eventually you'll see cracks and heavy damage start to show.
With diving, some methods of equalization are very aggressive and rough. The Valsalva maneuver is one of them. While you can clear cleanly with the Valsalva maneuver, you can also overpressurize your middle ear with excessive force. You can also force air past a block with this method, and most likely what happens is you break past the block and overpressurize; very violently I might add.
On the other hand with the Frenzel Maneuver, your range of overpressurization of your middle ear is much much smaller than the range that you can do with the Valsalva. You can break your eardrums with the Valsalva, you cannot do that with Frenzel. Frenzel is a lot less forceful than the Valsalva and takes more care to timing your equalization before you feel pressure from depth.
The BTV/VTO method is at the far end of this spectrum in that you cannot possibly ever overpressurize your air spaces, as it is a passive equalization method. There is absolutely no stress put on your middle air from the act of equalizing when you use this method. I believe personally every diver should work up to this method.
[Beance Tubaire Volotaire/Voluntary Tubal Opening]
