Greater auricular nerve damage or suture entrapment after facelift?

The greater auricular nerve innervates the ear lobule and helix.  Since your symptoms involve the entire ear, other nerves may be involved.  You may benefit from a revision to remove any deep sutures or scars that may be causing these symptoms.  

Hi suze0450,That sounds like a terrible problem! How miserable. I am sorry you are having trouble.The great auricular nerve supplies the ear lobe (see the attached reference) and so having the entire ear affected, if I understand your description correctly, would be an odd presentation for the great auricular nerve alone. It would also not affect your hearing. My advice for you would be to discuss with your surgeon, but also consider seeing an ear specialist, such as a neuro-otologist to ensure that there is nothing else going on.Good luck and please keep us updated!

These are not common but the possibility is almost always part of the facelift consent because even with great care it is possible to disturb the sensation in the distribution of these nerves.  As you are living it, the results can persist in a rare situations like yours for a very long time indeed and quite the possibility this can be a permanent issue. In 2013 Surgeons John Barbour M.D., Matthew Lorio M.D.  and David Halpern M.D. at Georgetown University Hospital Department of Plastic Surgery published a paper in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reported on 4 patients with Great auricular nerve dysesthesia after facelift.  The nerves were widely explored and decompressed. All patients reported improvement in symptoms.  John Barbour, M.D. is in private practice in Washington DC.  You might consider contacting him to see if he can assist you.

Have your doctor try some local anesthesia injections to where the injury seems to be and see if how it modifies your ear feelings.  Helps to localize the area of problem for suture or injury.

The great auricular nerve supplies sensation to the lower third of the ear and if it is cut you will likely have a permanent loss of feeling in this area that is unlikely to change this far after your surgery. There is no connection with this nerve and the nerve that provides for hearing, so I do not know what this is. Have an ENT look at the ear and test the hearing if this is a real symptom and persists. If it were entrapped and not cut I would expect a better chance of it coming back over 12-18 months. It would be a challenge to find both ends of the nerve to try to stitch it back together. That would be heroic, expensive, and unlikely to correct the problem. So, the risk/benefit ratio for this is not good.

There areseveral things that can cause this. Injury to the nerve during surgery can occur  from cutting it, suturing it, or scar tissue developing around it.  At this point it would be very difficult to know and even surgery may not improve it completely.