A Car Siren Started All This...

Hello everybody,

I lurked so far but it's time to introduce myself. English is not my first language, but I'm fluent with it.

I'm 44 and my predicament with T started in July 2015 when my car's siren set off in my building's garage. I was close to the car but I tried to run away from it, cover my ears. When it paused I tried to get in the car to disable the alarm, and in that moment it set off again before I could get in. I experienced ear fullness with T for several days after this event.

My right ear "popped up" after 3 days, but my left ones took one week. I ran a hearing test on my smartphone a month later: it looks like my left ear has lost 15db in the 6000hz range, being able to hear the tone only at 25db compared to the 10db of the right one (I say "it seems" because I didn't test my hearing before, and I seem to recall my left ear was less sensible to higher ranges even before this event). The rest of the test is perfect.

Nonetheless, it seemed my T was disappearing after just 2 weeks and I took a deep sigh of relief, what I came up to understand a few months later was that this was just part of a pattern, two or three bad days followed by two days where my T seemed close to disappear. It never actually did. Despite all this, I psychologically managed it well for 2 years, I think I believed it would have gone away eventually because in the same period I was tapering my lorazepam, dealing with a multitude of withdrawal symptoms, and I ended up believing my T could be one of them.

But two months ago all benzos withdrawal symptoms faded away, all but T.

So I began to panic at the thought this noise would never end. It's been a hell of a month, the worst in my life, riddled with anxiety for most of the time. I can't accept the fact my ear won't revert back to normal and that just because of a single event that spanned for no more than thirty seconds. I'm trying to get my psychological wellbeing back but it isn't easy at all.

All the horror stories I've read have convinced me I will never have my old life back.

 

At least you have some good days. Hopefully, the good interval will gradually lengthen...

 

Thanks Bill, I hope so...

 

I agree with Bill that we need to count the blessings or positives wherever and however we find it while living with T. This is because anxiety and stress are known to trigger or aggravate T. So try to stay clear of negative emotions as humanly possible as we can. Try to go back to enjoy life and count all the blessings. Having breaks of low T is a great blessing as many members have had loud T 7/24. If T spikes for sometime, you may want to use masking to help stay calm instead of panicking. Have you done masking much? Apparently some members including this member who is a doctor in the Doctor's Corner are taking this as a new normal in life. This is a wonderful approach to avoid getting too emotionally distressed by T. I like the idea of 'new normal' as it implies acceptance and that will help us stay off from extreme, negative emotions. Take care. God bless.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/curing-tinnitus.4136/page-5#post-40854

 

I agree with you completely billie48, especially considering that, for a full 24 months, I managed to sleep well and live a normal life with my T before freaking out and drowing in anxiety and depression. It was my psychological approach that made it so different: when I believed my T was going to disappear I managed it quite well, but since now I'm not confident at all this will ever happen, I have very negative emotions. Today it was a day of low T, and I lived it like when I was T free. Negative emotion and anxiety makes T worse for sure, I'm trying to stop focusing on it. When I do that, in days like these, I can't hear it at all. I think it can help me even when my T spikes. BTW, when it does, I tries to distract myself, i.e. watching my favourite TV show. But now I'm keeping a bluetooth speaker near my bed and I'll use it to mask my T if annoys me at night.