A new young member from a small country with a relapse...

Let me introduce myself! First of all, my English isn’t perfect… so I apologize for any mistakes
My name is Anke, live in Belgium and am new to this website (have been reading some posts for a while now but just found the courage to write my story). I got my tinnitus when I was 19 (and I’m 23 now) and I still don’t know how it came to be. I was never really the party type girl so loud concerts and parties were something I did not often go to. It was my first year of college and I was studying speech therapy and audiology. I do remember having a class about tinnitus and watching a short movie about people who have it and how they suffer and have suicidal thoughts and stuff. That definitely didn’t help much. Just one night I heard it and remembering that movie…well let me say it was a very difficult night for me. And then the hell began. I went to have hearing tests and they showed I did not have any hearing loss. My ENT told me that it was stress because of the exams and that it would go away when they were over. Well it did not, it was not that simple. I did not like my course I was doing so I ended up quitting that course and kind of sat at home for half a year doing not much… I was anxious, sleep deprived, scared for the future and actually felt depressed. My ex-doctor told me the legendary words “ you will just have to get used to it”. As many of you know, that does not really work for us. I cried almost every day.

My mom and bf at that time were very helpful though. I switched to another doctor and he actually helped me. He prescribed me an anti-anxiety drug, later on an anti-depressant and I was taking something to help me fall asleep too. I know some of you might think, wow those are a lot of drugs, but they so helped me get through the worst part. I still don’t regret taking all of those pills because it made my life better. I also started practicing Tai-Chi and went to a specialized clinic for tinnitus here in Belgium. By that time I got habituated to it. I quit all the drugs and was not anxious or depressed anymore. I really felt I got my life back. I also started a new course I really liked and I was also doing really good. After 2 years of being habituated to it I went to Canada to work there. I had an amazing time with my boyfriend and saw some beautiful nature and met wonderful people. Although I had habituated to it , it sometimes bothered me when it got worse but that was usually not for a long time.

I ended up coming back to Belgium and went to college here again. So my year was going great, I had some good exams but now a few weeks ago my tinnitus started to show up again. This time I was not able to get over it for some reason. I am under a lot of stress due to deadlines and upcoming finals and such. I started looking on the internet for a forum for tinnitus sufferers and here I found you guys. What a blessing this website is! There is so much support and love on this website. It is in one word : amazing! I still don’t understand why my brain can’t habituate to it immediately anymore and it brought me back to some negative thoughts and the anxiety is a bit back again. I do however have dealt with it before and I know I can deal with it again. I just need to go through a rough time again I guess. At this time I am only taking something to help me fall asleep. I have my jogging and school that distracts me and a wonderful mother and doctor who helps me through this rough time. But now I also have this website and it is a blessing. 4 years ago I did not have this website and found a bit relief on the Facebook page of the ATA society. My finals are coming up (here in July) and I am scared that the tinnitus will make me unable to study and that I fail my exams. I am going to try to not let this ruin my life and studies again as it did before. After my exams I am going back to Canada for 2 weeks and I also have a city trip to Vienna coming up so I have something to look forward to.

On October 7th I have an appointment at the specialized clinic for tinnitus here in Belgium for TRT. I do not know if it will be better by then or not but it is something worth trying. In the meanwhile I will keep checking this website for some support and I have dealt with it before and I hope i can deal with it again. The success stories are giving me hope again and although mine was a success story, I am having a relapse atm, but we will get through this together

Dear lord this was longer than I expected, but thank you for reading if you made it this far haha! If you have any questions you are always welcome to ask

 

Hey anke sorry your not doing well at the moment but you have habituated before so you will again. There is good information on here and many success stories. I was wondering if your t got louder or is the stress that is making it hard to deal with?

 

Hello Anke.

Your problem is similar to mine, because I only started to be afraid about my own tinnitus after a bad experience as yours. It was as if my body began to be worried about something that was always there… since my childhood, although I've never been someone who loves loud sounds. Well, maybe everyone on this planet has some kind of slight tinnitus, but probably they will be aware of it only in some moments of their lives. I'm very ok now with it (in my case fast recovery, only one week of suffering).

About your studies, don't be afraid. You'll be ok. I also had (and have) to do many exams and my results were pretty good, in despite of my tinnitus. Moreover, if you want to know it, it's interesting to note that many geniuses of mankind suffered with tinnitus (some of them with very severe cases), like Charles Darwin, Martin Luther, Beethoven, Vincent van Gogh and many, many, many others. For example, Darwin constantly complained about "buzzing" in his ears, the same as Beethoven.

The very Aristotle once said in 5th century BC, referring to tinnitus: "Buzzing in the ears ceases when a greater sound drives out the less."

Be well.

 

Hi Anke, thanks for sharing your story.
I'm in Alberta ,Canada. If you're visiting Alberta, call me up if you need any help/advise xx

 

Hi Anke, welcome to the site, I think y0u said it correctly in your statement "I am having a relapse atm" We all have this in all walks of life. You seem to be strong, you are young, you understand your situation, you are going to be fine.

 

Thank you for your reply My tinnitus gets louder when I am stressed I think and that makes it harder for me to deal with. When I was totally fine with it , it was there, because i could hear it slightly when I had to sleep, but it did not bother me at . Now it bothers me again all the time. But thank you for your kind words

 

Your words give me strength, thank you for that! Can I ask you what you did to concentrate while studying?

 

Funny, I am going to Edmonton, it is also the place where I lived for a year

 

Thank you Gary, it is nice to be understood by people who have the same condition as I do !!!

 

Oh wow , I'm 6 hours drive away at Lethbridge
If you visit Waterton Resort town, you'll drive through Lethbridge.
I'll pm you my phone number now.

 

Hi Anke,

I also had the "interference with studies" problem with my tinnitus. Mine was pretty catastrophic and i put my work on hold. Mine was due to a burn out so i had to stop for a while anyway. After a too long time spent literally banging my head on the walls i ended up being able to read and sleep in silence so in the end this is doable.

I know well the stress of the exams. Besides the usual tricks to study better (which reassure and lower the stress) you may want to talk with a psychiatrist. They are supposed to be the bests to know when and how you can take anti anxiety meds, how to avoid secondary effect or being hooked and such things. They are not only there for crazy or depressed people.

If you are doing TRT, i guess your tinnitus clinic is not the St Augustinus one in Wilrijk near Antwerp. It is a TRI clinic. I went there when they were at the UZA Antwerp and their rockstar physician had not yet emigrated to New Zealand. They were trying to reduce the noise and annoyance levels with meds and neuromodulation techniques. They are very up to date. They also had very long waiting lines last time i checked.

Good luck with your exams. I have only one and i am already stressed. Don't hesitate to get help for your stress.

 

In my case it was nothing specifically concrete, I've just played with my consciousness. I have mild tinnitus and one day simply out of the blue I started to be very worried about that because I thought it would negatively influence my very silent life (I work as a programmer, I study a lot and write and read a lot, I guess it's understandable…) This is what I did to overcame the problem completely:

First of all, I didn't try to negate my tinnitus, since this could worsen the situation. I understood that I have it, no doubt I had always had it. Second, I understood that I'm not alone. I can't say anything with certainty now about that, and I think scientists hadn't produced yet about this subject with all this range, but this is something very reasonable to think that not only millions of people on this Earth have T, but billions. Well, our brains are machines of infinite electrochemical reactions, blood is always circulating at high speed through our arteries and veins, our hearts are always pulsating, our organs are always operating… Yes, sure all these processes together would generate some kind of background noise and be noticed if we concentrate on it; thinking on the positive side, this means that we are alive . Through WEB there are many studies, many of them at PhD level, where it's postulated that mild Tinnitus is the rule (even for children, as in my own case), not the exception. For these cases the true villain isn't the T itself, but our concentration on it.

Third, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER let you enter the vicious cycle of fear, be your T mild or loud, that is, to be afraid of tinnitus and stop your daily activities because of that. This will make your T more noticeable and your consciousness will begin to treat your T as a menace, even though T does nothing to you. Even if you're worried about your T, you must compel your life to continue normally, in despite of everything. Soon enough your brain will be busy with other things and your T will be cast to the background (literally).

Fourth, don't believe that T is incurable, it's only complex because of its peculiarities. There are Ts that are more related to the brain's perception and others that are more related to physical things, like earwax or head injury. Each case is a case and each case has its specific treatments, sometimes surgeries or sometimes simply alimentation.

In bad days, don't forget music or white noise, although I don't recommend it to be always used to not turn out to be an addiction.

I hope it helps you. Don't hesitate to ask me anything else.

 

It actually is the one in Wilrijk near Antwerp. I went there 3 years ( or is it 4 already?) ago too and then I got the neuromododulation technique (I think) without drugs though. They have TRT now with Doctor Van Rompaey Diane. Many years ago I had to wait 1 year for my first apointment. Now, because I am already in the system I "only" have to wait 5 months.

Good luck with your exam too!

 

Anke,

If you do not know any possible cause meaning no medication caused it, infection or noise, then you could look into somatic tinnitus just in case. I don't know if that could be it or not, but you can learn about muscle trigger points and tinnitus. I have a lot of trigger points and also have tinnitus, so I know a lot.

One of my T sounds may be from trigger points, but that does not mean all because I had exposure to a toxin at onset.