I Don't Know How Long I've Had It

I may have had tinnitus since birth. I can't remember a time when silence didn't have a slight high pitched steady ring to it. However, a few years ago, my family started complaining about me not hearing them and I started complaining about them mumbling too much. After a physical one year the doc mentioned that I had a hearing loss in the higher frequency ranges. This makes sense since I've spent a lot of time around jet engines. Then I was in bed one night and my wife commented about how quite the house was. I remarked something like, "Yeah, except for the sound of silence." She asked what that meant and I said, "You know, that high pitched tone that you hear when it's really quite." She said, "No. I don't know that." Eureka! What I didn't say that night was that I was wondering why silence was beginning to get louder. Since she alerted me to the fact that the sound I hear isn't that of silence, I began to experiment. I determined that it was only in my left ear. A year later it was in my right as well. It's still louder in the left. If there is a sound in that tone, it better be pretty loud for me to pick it out of the background noise in my skull. I have noise generating hearing aids that help a little. I've also used the essential oils Basil and Geranium. In combination those also seem to deaden it a little for a short time, but mostly it's always louder than every other sound I hear.