Tank recently visited the “Tamron Hall Show” and opened up about his sudden sensory neural hearing loss diagnosis in 2021, which caused him to go deaf in his right ear.
I thought I had swimmers ear for, like, a couple days, and, you know, one day I’m walking back from the gym, and the earth just started shaking, and I literally, like, almost fall through a CVS window.
Luckily the hotel is only a block away so I get to my hotel, and I’m like ‘something’s wrong.’
I’m thinking maybe the blood’s not flowing the right way, you know, I’ll be cool.
I’m in good condition. I’m in great shape.
It turned into a tinnitus kind of thing where it just started sounding like a transistor radio, everything sounded like it was going through a walkie-talkie, and it just progressed from there.
Tank said he was on his last day of filming, around this time, but he was scared to get on the plane to go home because he felt like he had a “sinus infection mixed with a bunch of other things that you probably don’t want to get on the plane with.”
His good friend Turk took him to his doctor in Silver Springs, Maryland, where he was lightly diagnosed with some slight nerve damage.
The doctor felt it was possibly a temporary ear drum thing and prescribed Prednisone and another medicine for vertigo.
At that point, Tank said that he immediately had vertigo, and he was losing hearing in both ears.
When he got back to Los Angeles, he was completely losing hearing in his right ear, and his left ear was going.
As his condition got more extreme, he started doing hyperbaric chambers, and he started getting injections into his eardrum.
His Prednisone subscription increased from low levels to 60 milligrams a day.
Tank said the Prednisone was hurting his body, and the doctors told him there was no cure for what he had, so they were prescribing him medication based on what they felt would help because they didn’t know what caused his condition.
Well, there is no cure so what they think would help, you know what I mean, because there is no cause.
I was like, ‘How did this happen?… We don’t know how this happened.’
They don’t know, and so there’s is no cure.
There like we’re gonna throw these things at it and see what happens, and finally my doctor was like, ‘Man I’m just gonna, we’re gonna pull all of this stuff before it hurts you even more.’
By this point, I’m completely out of it. I’m completely depressed, and I think it was the first time in my life that I was down mentally, spiritually, and physically all at the same time.
Tank described losing his hearing as the test of his life, and he said his recovery and getting back to singing and performing started physically with him getting back in shape and relearning how to process and perform music with one ear.
Watch Tank’s interview on the “Tamron Hall Show” below:
Watch tank perform “Can’t Let It Show” from his new and final album R&B Money, on the “Tamron Hall Show” below:
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