Aeon Publishes an Essay About One Person's Experience with Tinnitus

In memory of all that I lost when tinnitus took away my silence | Aeon Essays

I read this today, and I have mixed feelings about it. It's beautifully written but becomes so poetic and nostalgic toward the end that it fails to capture just how horrific it is to have this condition.

So many people on this board have had a harder time habituating to tinnitus, and some have other conditions on top of it, like hyperacusis, trigeminal nerve issues, extreme reactivity, or periodic worsening. And then there's the discouraging march from the audiologist to the ENT to Primary Care to the Urgent Care clinic and back to the audiologist again, the bureaucratic complications caused by insurance companies and HMOs, and all the other miserable things that are part and parcel of living with this. That was the type of thing that I wanted to see in this essay, and I was sorely disappointed.

I'm not criticizing the author (who is obviously just writing about their personal experience and not attempting to enumerate the trials and tribulations of all other tinnitus sufferers), nor am I downplaying their suffering, nor am I disrespecting the quality of the essay, which is excellent. I'm not criticizing Aeon either, as it's a bit like a literary magazine crossed with a science magazine, and I know that any piece they publish on a subject like tinnitus isn't going to cover the type of ground I'd want it to. It's the kind of publication that will put a poetic spin on a dry subject to make it interesting or even downright inspirational.

All I'm saying is that if I were a millionaire looking for a cause to support, this Aeon essay wouldn't inspire me to donate big bucks to find a treatment or a cure. This would only inspire a brief moment of sympathy, like, "Oh, so the silence is gone forever for this poor guy. That really sucks, but he's still alive." And then I'd move on and drop another million bucks on something like breast cancer research because cancer can kill people and because mastectomies are visible, tangible reminders of what cancer can do. But it's hard for most people to care about ear problems because the suffering is invisible, and it's not like anybody had their ear literally fall off or require complete surgical removal like a breast. Even the few people on this board who have exploding head syndrome aren't in any danger of having their heads literally explode. Still, if that were a possibility, then maybe we'd be closer to finding a cure because we can all agree that it would be terrible to have a disease that literally causes your skull to detonate like a bomb.

Sorry for the rant. I do know that there are plenty of other terrible diseases out there that need more awareness and more research funding. It's just that I get so disappointed when I click on a headline about ear problems, and it doesn't get into the absolute worst things that can happen to the sufferer.