My Tinnitus Experience

Hi all,

I just wanted to detail my journey with tinnitus. Hopefully it will help others the way I was helped by reading stories on this forum.

I got tinnitus around 6 weeks ago. It started as an occasional rumble in my right ear. No idea what caused it. It could have been listening to loud music on headphones. It could have been an antibiotic (Ciprofloxacin) I was taking. Could have been stress. Or a combination of all these things.

After a week or so it became a fairly constant high ringing tone, and it moved to both ears. For the first few days I was able to mask it with tv / podcasts. But after a while it became totally intrusive. Either that or I started to obsess over it. In any case, I began to panic. I frequently had anxiety attacks, crying, dread, and thoughts of suicide. I couldn't sleep - with benzos I managed a maximum of 4 hours per night - and I was like a zombie during the day. It didn't help that I kept reading stories of others who had not yet habituated to it and expressed their own helplessness. I became completely hopeless and despairing.

Now, 4 or 5 weeks on, I'm a different person. What helped? Four things:

1. I reached out to friends and acquaintances and discovered that a couple had tinnitus, and had had it for some years. They shared their stories, and showed that it's possible to live with it.

2. Reading success stories (i.e. not people who got rid of tinnitus, but who had learned to live with it) on this forum and elsewhere. The fact that they had begun in a similar pit of despair and had clawed their way out of it was inspiring.

3. Probably most importantly, and maybe most controversially given that some of you might be sceptical about medication: my doctor prescribed me antidepressants. One of them helped me sleep (it has a sedative side-effect) and the other helped with the anxiety. With sleep I was better able to reason about the tinnitus.

4. Getting on with normal activities as if my tinnitus wasn't bothering me. It *was* bothering me, but I found that if I started on something, after 20 minutes or so I would start to forget about the tinnitus.

So where am I now? As I type, I hear the tinnitus ringing in both ears. I'm in a quiet room, which makes it worse, but it's not sending me into a panic. I'm able to concentrate on other things. At times, it seems to go away for an hour, until I think about it again or I get a quiet moment.

I don't now expect it to disappear, though obviously that would be great. But I am learning to live with it. Obviously I'm in the early stages, and anything could happen. I also know that others have it worse than me. But 5 weeks ago I never thought I would get used to what I thought of then as this monster in my head. I'm not quite used to it yet, but I have experienced a change in my attitude I didn't think was possible. If it can happen to me, it can happen to you too.

 

What a fantastic post. I agree staying positive, keeping busy and carrying out as normal (with precautions) is the key. Above all try to train yourself to think about other more important matters than looking out for the tinnitus.

 

Thanks! And I should stress it's not all roses - last night for example I was grumpy from having a spike in the tinnitus all day, and that had a knock-on effect on my relationship, as it sometimes will. I would still give a lot to be rid of the tinnitus. But for people who are in the total depths of despair, as I was, it's important to know that (at least in moderate cases like mine) the mental / coping aspect can get better.