My introduction (Teenager)

Hello everybody my name is Luke, i'm 16 years old and have lived with tinnitus for 1 year now.
Live in the Uk.
It was sometime during march/april of 2013 when I was diagnosed with tinnitus. Like most people, I was freaking out when I was first diagnosed. Suicide was an option but I chose to not be a coward and to face up to it and try to fight it the best way I could.

When I first was diagnosed with tinnitus my parents were always worried and depressed which didn't make me feel any better at all. I went to see a tinnitus specialist, he would talk to me about how to mask the noise and also gave me an earplug which had the white noise audio on it.

The ringing in my ears is in both ears, started off mild but now is very sharp and a lot louder. It is worse at night, and when I wake up, I feel depressed most days but same days I just ignore it the best way I can.

As I am typing this it is literally piercing my ears as i'm in complete silence. :'( I always thought that it might go away after 1 month? I used to wake up everyday and listen to see if it had gone but surprise surprise nothing special.

The reason for me signing up on this forum is to talk with others who are going through what I am going through as that always helps. And i've also noticed it getting worse this past week which doesn't help at all. If anybody is wondering how I got my tinnitus it was through listening to loud music through headphones. Ever since I was 12/13 I would listen to music extremely loud in headphones not knowing about this condition until it hit me right in the face. But anyways if you made it this far i'd like to say thank you for reading what I had to say and hopefully I can read more stories!

-luke

 

Hi Luke, sorry this happened to you at such a young age...but younger people tend to be more resilient.
May I ask how loud do you perceive your tinnitus in say walking down the street - is it clearly heard over traffic noise?
Suicide is a really bad option at this point seeing as we have some exciting new tinnitus drugs in the pipeline. Also you need to live with it for at least a decade before you do anything stupid. Most people habituate within 2 years.

 

It isn't heard clearly over traffic noise but I can hear it if i'm walking in quiet areas. Thanks for your interest btw
Any news on these tinnitus drugs?
It is currently 3:19 am another sleepless night :L

 

Hi Luke

"...it is literally piercing my ears as i'm in complete silence." You should try to avoid complete silence. Listen to some background music, radio etc when you are awake. The same applies to night and sleeping. I personally love the sound of rain, which helps me sleep well. You can for example try this app. http://rain.simplynoise.com I connect my iPad to a quality active speaker. Being able to sleep is SOOOOO CRITICAL with not just T management, but life in general. Try sleeping meds if nothing else helps. Imovane is one good choice.

You'll get over this. I went to hell and back myself. My T still annoys me a lot from time to time, but I'm not desperate with it any more. And as said here already, you are young and that will probably help also a lot. Take care!

 

Thank you for this I will use the app tonight to help me sleep, I used to use an ear piece which was good but it kind of made my ringing worse so I just completely stopped using it. Thank you for reading my introduction also!

 

well Luke, no news yet but we should have some important news some time during this year.
keep using sound enrichment as Sound Wave said.

 

There's tons. Check out the "Research" and "Treatment" forums. Many companies are developing treatments and supposed cures. The techniques range from inhibiting glutamaic acid production (AM-101) to gene therapy (reprogram the ear to allow reproduction of hair cells) to stem cell research (from targeting the individual hair cells to regeneration of the cochlea). It's gonna be a decade or 2 at the fastest, but the pressure on the medical community to fix this has become extraordinary.

 

awesome!

 

Love your insightment and positivness

 

Indeed : )

Keep in mind, even though in your lifetime there will be treatments available, it's best to live life with tinnitus as you would without. Even I have issues with this at times, along with a lot of members of this board, you just have to wise up to letting it hurt your mental state. My dad has had it forever and never ever in a million years mentions it. He not only has loud severe tinnitus in his left ear, but he also has no hearing in it. He only cares about achieving his current passions and goals. He has mentioned before that if there was a treatment, he'd absolutely take it, because why not? It's not his life though. He'd also like to lose some bodyfat, and learn a lot of things, but some of those things he'll never bother to attend to, just like his tinnitus . That's the kind of attitude everyone who has it needs. We'll be able to enjoy blissful silence at some point, but enjoying silence daily is not the purpose of living

 

Glad to hear someone is looking for a cure. Back here in the Philippines, we don't have such access or just probably just too expensive for like me to afford.