Since her first night at "The Bachelor" mansion, Daisy Kent has been vocal about her hearing loss.
After making an impression on her first night, show lead, Joey Graziadei, selected 25-year-old Kent for a date during which Kent opened up about her battle with Lyme disease. Kent also showed Graziadei the cochlear implant she wears due to hearing loss that's worsened since her teens and told him about the disability advocacy work she’s been doing since.
“When I was 11, I started to have these stroke-like seizures,” Kent told Graziadei over dinner. Kent says she was in constant pain, she had difficulty walking and subsequently spent a lot of time in bed. Even minor illnesses she’d catch from her siblings seemed to always hit her harder than anyone else. Then, one morning when she was 17, she realized she couldn’t hear her father well as he tried waking her up and her hearing got progressively worse. “Communicating was really hard for me and it was super isolating,” she said. She was eventually diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, an inner ear condition that causes vertigo and hearing loss, according to the Mayo Clinic.
As for her physical pain, doctors diagnosed Kent with Lyme disease at 21 years old — an experience she’s described in detail on social media. She sought treatment for 30 days at a clinic in Germany which turned her health around and alleviated her pain, but still her hearing deteriorated due to what Kent suspects is the combination of Lyme disease and Ménière’s disease.
Last year, things started looking up for Kent. “The reason that I can communicate with you the way I can is because I have a cochlear implant,” Kent said on the show. She had the electronic device surgically implanted last year to help her better perceive sound.
Kent has come a long way since she began losing her hearing and the road to getting here has been complicated. Here’s everything to know about Ménière’s disease and its connection to Lyme disease:
What is Ménière’s disease?
Ménière’s disease, a rare inner ear disorder, impacts your hearing and your sense of balance, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Ménière’s is caused by endolymph, a fluid in the inner ear, that accumulates and impacts your sense of balance and hearing. But researchers don’t yet know why endolymph builds up in the first place. When too much builds up it blocks your brain from being able to communicate with your inner ear resulting a disruption of balance and hearing, per the Cleveland Clinic. For some people, Ménière’s disease comes on randomly, and for others it’s genetic. Kent has pointed out on TikTok that there’s no history of hearing loss in her family.
“For me, mainly, (Ménière’s has) decreased my hearing. It causes a lot of pressure feeling in my head, vertigo, and a ton of tinnitus,” Kent said on TikTok. “But my left ear, since I got my implant, I don’t have as much ringing in my ear. But my right ear, I have a ton of ringing.”
In honor of National Cochlear Implant Day, on Feb. 26, Kent posted a video of the day she received her implant and a series of photos on Instagram with a caption describing how she felt as her hearing worsened. “Losing my hearing has been the loneliest pain I have experienced,” Kent wrote. “I pictured myself in a glass box since I was 15 and I’m pounding on the walls screaming and terrified.”
In some cases, medication, dietary changes or therapy are enough to resolve Ménière’s and reduce the fluid and therefore the pressure in the inner ears, but it’s not a permanent fix. Even when treated, Ménière’s disease will always come back, per the Cleveland Clinic. And if untreated for too long, the disease will worsen and potentially cause long-term balance problems and deafness.
What is Lyme disease?
Lyme disease is a tick-borne illness that spreads borrelia bacteria through the body, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, rash, headaches and joint pain.
The process for diagnosing Lyme disease is varied. Sometimes, doctors will detect it based on physical clues including rashes, and other times, they’ll run labs or investigate your daily routine to determine whether you’ve been exposed to ticks, says the CDC. Treating it, in most cases, means a round of antibiotics. But if it’s left untreated, the CDC warns the infection can spread to your joints, heart and nervous system.
In Kent’s case, once she was diagnosed with Lyme disease at 21, her doctors suspected she’d actually contracted the disease in childhood, she said on TikTok.
Kent says she suspects her hearing loss is the result of both Ménière’s disease and Lyme disease, “but we’re not 100% sure,” she added on TikTok.
Are Ménière’s and Lyme disease linked?
While Lyme disease can be a rare cause of sudden hearing loss, there's no evidence that indicates it's connected to gradual hearing loss or Ménière’s disease, says Dr. Paul Auwaerter, clinical director of the division of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins.
But, inner ear inflammation that can come about because of Lyme disease looks a lot like Ménière’s disease and can damage hearing nerves, says Dr. Sujana Chandrasekhar, nuerotologist at ENT & Allergy Associates, clinical professor at Northwell and President of the American Otological Society. And that feeling of fullness in the ear can result in vertigo, another symptom of Ménière’s.
There are a number of research papers that have investigated a link between the two diseases, Chandrasekhar points out. Some investigate the effects of Lyme disease on the inner ear and nerves in the ear, while others look into the connections between vertigo resembling Ménière’s disease and Lyme disease. But there remains no definitive link between the two.
Lyme disease can exacerbate existing illnesses including Ménière’s. "Anyone that has a functional preexisting illness can absolutely can (get) worse after Lyme disease," Auwaerter says. "That includes anxiety, depression, migraine disorder, people that have functional disorders like irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia." And the facial inflammation that often accompanies Lyme disease is likely to worsen Ménière’s symptoms too, says Chandrasekhar, "(Lyme) finds your weak spot."