13 years without much trouble, but now seemingly getting worse...

(Sorry that this is a bit of a repetition from my two initial posts on this board, but I felt the need to post an introduction as well)

Hey all,

I’m a 30 year old guy from Sweden and I’ve had tinnitus since I was 17. It was caused by my moped at the time which had a broken tailpipe and was very loud. One day when I stepped off it I had a hissing/ringing high pitched sound in my head (or equal in both ears, I'd say around 12-15kHz). I habituated fairly quickly to the sound and have lived without much irritation from it ever since, even though I can hear it pretty much in any environment, I can usually ignore it easily. Even when I had a period of severe anxiety problems in my early twenties the tinnitus didn’t seem to affect, or be affected by this, which makes me pretty sure that it is solely caused by the exposure to loud noise that I had. Some other details about it is that it is somatic and increases momentarily if I bite down my teeth hard, or if I move my jaw in an extreme manner.

Also, a thing that I think separate me from many other tinnitus sufferers is that I find it easiest to deal with when I’m somewhere quite. It’s if my brain thinks it’s more difficult to deal with the tinnitus sound simultaneously as dealing with other sound input from outside my head. This is especially true when I have my loud periods. Because of this, sleeping has never been a problem for me. I have regularly been going to concerts and night clubs without almost ever having any problems, sometimes using earplugs when it’s been very loud, but most of the time without if I've felt the volume isn't too high. Sometimes (maybe 5-10 times per year) my tinnitus (smilingly randomly but sometimes after loud noise exposure, weather change or when I have colds) starts to "tingle" and become a bit unstable. This has usually gone away within a few hours to a couple of day.

A while ago I had an accident with my stereo receiver. I won’t go into the technical details of it, but the short story is that all of a sudden the volume turned to max while I was sitting infront of the speakers, facing them. I don’t know how loud it was in dB’s, but it was loud to the point that my heart started pumping rapidly as I quickly turned the volume dial down again. My ears didn’t hurt at first and my tinnitus seemed unaffected. After about two days however i entered a pretty severe unstable state. Now, after three weeks it still hasn’t settled and I'm starting to grow scared that it won’t go away, since I’ve never experienced an unstable state this long before. My high pitched sound is louder and screechier and more unstable than ever, still at this point. But even more annoying and weird is that I only two days ago noticed a very low pitched tone in my right ear, at around 485Hz. I thought it was just my brain going nuts in general over the spike, but now two days later the exact tone is still there.

What makes it super annoying is that these two sounds that I now have are very far away from each other in character and frequency, and even though the high-pitched sound is very loud at the moment this difference per-say drives me nuts. The high-pitched sound is annoying when there are other loud noises around me, and in my daily life, but at least l had the "silence" of only being with me and my tinnitus sound when I was going to sleep for ex, which was fine. Now however, I have the low pitched sound bugging me when it's quiet, and feel I can't find refuge in either silence or noisy environments anymore.

Sorry for the not-so-happy introduction, but just wanted to give you guys the reason for why I came to this site, after 13 years of relative peace! I have faith in that I will overcome this too however, and also that we WILL see a cure within a few years!

 

@Philip83 Sorry to hear about this man. While I'm posting this, my high pitch mistress is nagging me

 

Phillip so very sorry to hear about your T experiences, Like you I am hoping and praying for a cure for all of us. You were so very young when you began with your T, I am 57 and this is my first ever episode of T. It has been frightening, depressing and all of it makes me tired, anxious and fearful. It has been 10 weeks for me now. I started after a long bout with sinus infection and bronchitis.

 

Hang in there, Hugg!