Temporary hearing loss or a ringing in the ears is a sign these cells are trying to recover. But over time, recovery becomes impossible and hearing is permanently impaired.

Some people are too severely deaf to benefit from conventional hearing aids; a cochlear implant may be a suitable alternative but only for a proportion of them.

An early sign of damaged hearing is temporary deafness after listening to loud music. This is known as the threshold shift and means you have damaged the cochlea in your ear so that your hearing takes time to revert to normal.

I couldn't hear anything because my ears had been blasted, ... I had temporary hearing loss. The tent was full of smoke and dust. Of course Jim was screaming in pain and bleeding. And I reached for my vest to throw over him to protect him from what else was going to happen.

You do have a high-frequency hearing loss, most likely due to that excessive noise exposure.

Unfortunately, the ear buds are even more likely to cause hearing loss than the muff-type earphones that were used on Walkman and portable CD players.