Lo Bosworth has undergone surgery after her hearing got "way worse" during her pregnancy.
The former Hills star and husband Dom Natale welcomed daughter Nelle into the world in January, and while she had been experiencing drastic hearing loss over the last few years, it declined sharply during her pregnancy, so she took up the option to have an operation to try and improve the situation.
Speaking in an Instagram video, Lo said: “I had surgery on my inner ear yesterday and the recovery has not been as easy as I thought it was going to be.
“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.
“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.
“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.”
Lo, 39, had prosthetic stapes implanted to avoid the need for external hearing aids any more, but found the first 24 hours after the procedure to be "pretty rough".
She said: “They put you under general anaesthesia for a stapedectomy because they need you to be perfectly still, and I think waking up from general anaesthesia can be really tough.
“It was really tough for me yesterday, my blood pressure was really low afterwards, so [doctors] were really worried.
"I felt awful. I had a really rough last night coming on. 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.
“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.”
But despite the initially difficult recovery, Lo is hopeful the procedure was successful because she is “trying to improve [her] lifestyle pretty dramatically.”
