Hearing issues caused by Meta Quest 2

I like to do sim racing, and when I found I could do iRacing using my Quest 2 I immediately started using it a lot. It is a much more immersive experience, and much more realistic. However, after a while I started to get this feeling that I had something stuck in my ears. I didn't even think that this might be connected to my Quest usage in any way. Normally when I mow my lawn I use those foam ear plugs that you squeeze and put in your ear, and they then expand to fill your ear, and I started to experience a sensation like I still had them in my ears after I took them out. It wasn't that my hearing was muffled - it just felt like I had something in my ears. I just put up with it for ages - I assumed that the earplugs must have lead to a build-up of wax in my ears. Don't know why I came to that conclusion, but that was what I thought it must have been.

Over the course of many months the sensation started to get stronger, and one time when I was at the doctor's for something else I told him about the sensation of something being stuck in my ear, and that I assumed I had a wax build-up, and asked him to take a look. He said my ears were perfectly clear, and that I should go and see my dentist, his reasoning being that sometimes a misaligned jaw can lead to ear irregularities. I didn't really think this was the case, as I had not been having any jaw problems, so I just left it, and put up with the weird feeling in my ear.

A couple of weeks later the feeling of something in my ear became really bad, and I started to sort-of lose my hearing. It's a bit hard to describe, because I could still hear, but my hearing just went really strange. Some frequencies seemed to disappear altogether, while others became strangely exaggerated. My son has a tricked-up Subaru, which rumbles really loudly, and the day he drove down the driveway and I didn't hear the car at all I realised that I needed to see a doctor again. It seemed to me that I was going suddenly and catastrophically deaf. I thought I must have had something seriously wrong in my head, so I went to the doctor and he said I had Eustachian Tube Dysfunction, probably caused by all the flights I had taken over the previous few months, and gave me some cortisone tablets. The same day I went to an audiologist, and the tests she ran showed that my hearing was actually intact.

Anyway, the cortisone tablets did the trick. But.....ever since then I have had the same thing happen many times over the course of about 18 months. Every now and then I get a strange sensation like there is something stuck in my ears, and my hearing goes strange again. Again, it is really hard to actually explain the sensation - it feels like hearing things from under a blanket, and another thing I have noticed is that it is usually accompanied by this strange throbbing sound - it sounds like there is always some heavy machinery working nearby, which I can vaguely hear a rhythmic throbbing from. There was one day when I was walking on a beach, and there was a breese blowing from behind me, and I could actually hear this strange flapping noise which I assume was the sound of the breese flapping my ears!

I have used the cortisone tablets a couple of times, and they always fix the problem. I have gone to great pains to try to rule out as many possible causes as possible, but the one thing that seems to keep coming back as the cause is my Quest 2 headset.

I had another episode a few weeks ago, so I went on another course of cortisone tablets for 5 days, which cleared it up. At this point I also stopped using my Quest 2....which was a bit of a bummer, because I really like my sim racing, but for a while there I had perfectly clear hearing, and no sensation of something being stuffed into my ears.

Today I gave in and used my Quest 2 - only for about an hour, and by this afternoon I had the sensation again. There is now absolutely no doubt in my mind that the problem is caused by the Quest 2. It's don't think it's a problem of the sound of the Quest being too loud and causing deafness that way - I have the volume turned down very low when I use the quest - in my uneducated opinion I think that it is something to do with the pressure exerted by the headset on my face. I don't know enough to explain it, but I am absolutely certain that the Quest is the cause.

I am not looking to sue anybody, or place any sort of blame, but as far as I can tell, the problem is caused by the Quest 2, and I am trying to find out why, a and what I can do about it. I realise that this is probably a very weird problem and I may be the only person in the world experiencing it.