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I first heard tinnitus in late August of 2015. It was weird, but I was just thinking about it one day when I came across an instance of some musician having tinnitus. And I wondered what that would be like. And then all of a sudden I could hear it. You can imagine that this freaked me out a lot. It seemed like it wasn’t at all real, because it’d seemed to come out of nowhere. It took me an age to accept (if I ever even fully did) that this was now the state of my ears. I don’t actually think. however, that my brain just pulled the sound out of nowhere, because it was the middle of summer with crickets blaring outside my window all day every day, so I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t looking for it in a sealed room, and I /had/ been to a concert a week prior that had been far, far too loud. Painfully so. I remembered hearing ringing in my ears after leaving the venue and thinking nothing of it. I had my right ear closest to the music and had been kind of plugging my left with my finger for a while.


And now I was left with ringing in that same ear.


I don’t think my T was very severe at all, but I can’t really tell if it was moderate or minor. I completely lost it. I have a history of depression and it absolutely destroyed me. I left for university and kept thinking that it would go away. I read about timelines for these things. And kept bargaining and extending the “deadline” for it to go away. I told myself things like “it’s still only 2 months after the fact.” I changed my mind about how loud it was on the daily. I checked constantly. My first inkling that it had gotten a bit quieter was November of that year, but I changed my mind constantly about this as well. Thinking “you’re kidding yourself nothing happened” and the next moment thinking “it’s gonna fade it’s gonna fade.”


Things went on like this for months. I started to think it might actually fade around April 2016. My tone seemed to have faded into white noise, but it was still annoying, and there were days that I thought I could hear the tone again. I was still freaked out. That summer I started saying that my T was basically gone. And this was true, on some days. And not on others.


Flash forward to now, April 2017. I definitely have significant reduction in T. The bulk of that reduction happened after the 8 month mark ish. As of now, I can hear a slight bit of white noise, but is genuinely not bothersome and I’m not sure if I had it in the first place or not. I no longer feel the need to check constantly. While I do think the anxiety in the beginning (and the middle and the end ha) plays a big role in what you hear, habituation can most definitely not explain my recovery, not entirely.


I will now forever protect my ears, never put my ears in danger like that in a situation I didn’t even want to be in bc it was uncomfortably loud. Still scared of clubs, but I didn’t like those in the first place. In terms of what I did to improve, I’m not sure what to say. I massaged my neck, did TMJ exercises, and alternately masked with these, when anxiety was high:

http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=a_LRAI3GkOs&p=n

http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=a_LRAI3GkOs&p=n

http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=FkVX52AdX5o&p=n

I also tried to sleep in silence. I don’t know if I was imagining things or not, and I know people who have done this for years and it has apparently never helped them, but I thought it helped in the long-term. I’m not sure, though.


Note: I found out I could manipulate it slightly by my neck, but I don’t think it originated from TMJ, although I do have it. By bending my neck, left ear to shoulder, the tone in my right ear would disappear. I don’t know what that means at all. I genuinely still think it was caused by noise damage, but I can’t be sure, so I thought I’d mention that.


So anyway, I wanted to write this so that people know that things can improve after the 1 yr mark. I know it’s so hard to wait. And it’s terrifying. And some people will just have to live with it I suppose. But yeah. That’s just my experience. I will be around to answer random questions if you have any for a while, but after that I’d like to leave this place behind forever. No offense, but I'd really like to never have to come back and just move on from this (having learned something, of course).