Are You Kidding Me...

i know something is not right how can it be spiking everyday.. i had to go to the dmv which is a couple of streets away from my house to get me a drivers license which i lost.. kept contemplating in my head not to go but i had to..the truck i drove drivers side window has a little opening it doesnt shut all the way at least the dmv is right close..i put on my earplugs on and i went. and when i stopped for the stop sign this school bus passed across from me and i also used my hands to cover my ears when i saw it but i didnt hear it so i figured it didnt affect me..so i get there and it is too packed so i come back home take off my plugs and realized that it had spiked again both of my ears and they are red,i felt very nauseous and sick to my stomach that it happened again...just wow...cant catch a break ..my T doesnt act normal...

 

@Geo hang in there! I feel the exact same way when my T spikes, especially if I did my best to prevent a spike, it feels like its not fair when it happens. But it'll be okay,hopefully your spike goes down soon. Keep your head up.

 

@stacey this has been happening to frequent now it happened yesterday and two days before basically the past 2 months this has been going on..and i dont feel like being a baby about but no one will understand me but this site..

 

@Geo I know exactly how u feel, I've been struggling with it for about 8 months now and no one not even my family understands because only ppl with T knows how bad the ringing is. I've had many break downs because of it, this site has helped me a lot, we all understand. If u don't mind me asking what caused your T?

 

Perhaps you have hyperacusis which I had soon after the start of my high pitch T. It turned all normal sounds glassy and piercingly hurtful. I remember trying to put on ear plugs all the time to protect from normal sounds. Even the soft voice of my wife hurt when speaking close to me. I felt being drilled in the ears with painful sensation. It surely scared the heck out of me as I have never had hearing or ear issues prior to this. But like many people who develop H after T, the H just faded within the year from the start. Hope your condition will improve. If you want, you can post in the Hyperacusis Support forum for help. You can ask the doctors in Doctor's Corner, or Dr. Charlie who is a retired ENT.

 

A school bus that you couldn't hear with ear plugs in and your hands covering your ears will not spike your T.

 

Agreed. Makes me think that his psycological reaction to the episode spiked it.

 

The problem is that sometimes just wearing earplugs spikes T.
So its damned if you do and damned if you dont sort of thing.

 

@stacey im going to say how i feel i got it..so in may of 2012 me n some friends went shooting since we live in the desert its the thing to do here i guess . ive never been shooting before so this was my first time. i woke up late that day and didnt want to go but my friend convinced me so we went a we got there they had a couple of guns , a 9mm, Ar15 and i believe a 40caliber.. so we started shooting a couple of rounds and towards the end my friends told me i i wanted to try his 40 and i was like ok even tho we were already going to leave and towards the end my friend tells me they had plugs just in case and mind u this is my first time shooting so had no idea i needed plugs.. no one wore them when we were shooting..as i am shooting the gun i feel a pop on my left ear and that gun was louder than the others and after both my ears were ringing... i thought it was normal as i have gotten it before thru clubs or concerts..the next day it was gone but i had pressure in my left ear and i remember when i heard a pop so a week passes and i still feel pressure and itll pop here and there so i got to a local doctor wasnt the best since i didnt have insurance at that time.. so i tell him i feel pressure i my ear so he checks it tells me what happened told him went shooting about two weeks ago..he tells me if i have ringing i say no because i didnt just feels a little pressure or like hearing loss kinda..so he tells me its maybe a infection so he gives me antibiotics and im on my way months pass and in december 2012 i hear a small little ring when i woke up one day to go to work i was like huh why is it ringing but as soon as i left the room didnt hear it all day so this happened for like 3 weeks didnt bother me i for sure though it just needed its time to leave so didnt go to a doc. right before i heard the ringing i was stressing alot everyday on a personal issue.. like really stressed wasnt eating was down for like 2 weeks of bad stress and was gearing up for training for my new job and someone had my truck to paint double crossed me and spent my money and locked up my truck somewere and couldnt locate it for a month and was stressing alot because i needed my truck for that job...while training i was driving an hour away away from home, came back from training and went to the gym when i got out i noticed my T increased and got scared now it was noticible before i can barely hear it at night now it was...im guessing it was the headphones that triggered it..but basically i dont know if it was a result of the shooting which was 6 months before i actually got the T or if it was the stress that came to be the triggered it...my second ent said it was a mixture of everything.. they did a hearing test they said i lost a little hearing in the high frequencys on my left but none on the right.but the t was only in my left ear. another doc said after the shooting i didnt take care of myself as in i was still going to the movies, partying etc it took a toll on my ear but it wasnt ringing so how was i suppose to know... so it was either the shooting months before the t or the stress i was on

 

@Jesse Pinkman then how did it spike it did spike because both of my ears just went up and i had aching in the right..and both felt hot like on fire...

 

@dan why is that i felt like sometimes just wearing up went up too is it because when you wear them u hear is so much louder like crazy loud so when u take them off ur still somewhat listening to the same loud pitch?

 

@billie48 yes i do have H i have had it again for the past two months everything i hear hurts is that why my ear might ache or why my T spikes alot because of the H...the last time i had it wasnt that long ago it was late june and lasted two months..im scared of my own coughs and sneezes because i am a loud sneezer..

 

@Geo your doc is right it's definitely combo of everything that caused the T, stress always makes every situation worse, especially with T it feels like it makes it louder, even if you don't get enough sleep. I know all of those reasons especially the gun shooting incident must have been stressful, I know u mentioned that afterwards u weren't being careful but as u said u didn't know, I know its the little things the play a huge factor, even the head phones. Have u tried using peltor ear muffs instead of ear plugs?

 

Ok, there are 2 mechanisms happening here at the same time. I will try to explain.
First, since you aquired hf hearing loss your brain is now constantly looking for the lost frequency(ies) but cant find them obviously, hence the tinnitus replaces them. Now when you wear earplugs what happens is that the hearing loss is accentuated artificially and so the brain ramps up its hyperactivity in search of the frequencies and hence louder tinnitus - it is not just a perception of louder T. So when you take out the plugs, it takes a while for the brain to readjust itself. This is why they say dont OVERprotect, because that will increase the gain of central hyperactivity T and even can induce H.

The second part with the ears on fire syndrome, it is as Bill said, a form of H.
It is sort of like Fibromyalgia patients feel pain upon touching near hyperactive nerves. So when you put in ear plugs they irritate the canals so u feel some pain. You can say we have Fibro in our ears.
I have it too.

 

@stacey will earmuffs protect same as earplugs if they have the same db rating? yeah one ent said it was the shooting the, the one i was currently seeing said it was a mixture of everything because i didnt get T right away with the shooting but i did get hr loss...

 

@dan man you have answered the Q's my ents couldnt even answer thanks. when that incident happened today as i said my left ear is the one that is severe and my right feels its also getting bad. since the left has the HR why did the right one flare up also if i have no hearing loss on it..and lately feel if the left one spikes it also spikes the right one so they are now connected somehow ? even tho i just started getting the right side like 2 months ago

 

@dan and also is it the hf hearing loss that makes tinnitus worse as to say if i didnt have hearing loss would it be this bad? and i never overprotect my ears i only would wear them when i would go to a place that was too noisy and only started doing that when my T got too bad..

 

@Geo some ppl use both earplugs and earmuffs together for more protection but I only use ear muffs because its not good to over protect the ears because then they won't know how to react to normal sounds, there has to be a balance. I prefer using earmuffs better because it masks out more sounds but that's just me if ear plugs are more in your favor stick with them. I think that your hr loss might have been caused by the gun shot being that its super loud, I'm still surprised that they didn't warn you before u went gun shooting.

 

Yes, the ears are not connected to each other but the brain is connected to both equally and it is responsible for referring the same feelings to the other ear, even though the other one might not be as damaged. It is called central tinnitus.
If you didnt have any hearing loss or damage then you would not get tinnitus.
HF hearing is not the only place along the auditory pathway that noise can damage and in any case they dont test abouve 8khz, although we should hear up to 16khz in middle age.
If you have damage and hearing loss but your brain (central auditory mechanism) was strong, you would not get tinnitus. Stress weakens this part of the brain and lets more tinnitus through.

 

I agree with @stacey, the gunshots initiated the chain reaction in your auditory system.
Your doctor was right about one thing, you should have taken great care of your ears upon hearing that first mild ringing, but you had no way of knowing and then you would of had to live like a hermit for the rest of your life to prevent further cascade reaction, or take Retigabine drug to stop the process.

 

@dan about the early spike i still hear it louder on both ears even though ive calmed down.. im looking at my audiogram chart i took in 2013 i took a recent one about 3 months ago but didnt get a copy but looked similar.. left ear only normal then about 3khz takes a hit and goes down to 40db at 4khz then starts going up again to 20db at 6khz and back to normal at 8khz and above....is that considered high frequency?

 

No its called the 4khz noise induced notch. HF loss is at 7khz and above.

 

@dan i feel like the most recent one didnt look as bad as the first one i ever got one a month after T..how loud is your T dan if you dont mind me asking..

 

@dan im not too sure wha that means induced notch?

 

The actual amount of hearing loss is not very well correlated with the loudness of T.
There are stone deaf people with ZERO T, and people with little loss with bad T.
It depends on the circumstances of how the T started - stress, meds, noise, head trauma, etc.

My T is so loud I can hear it clearly 24/7 It is so horrible that you might get a panick attack if I describe it to you.

 

noise induced hearing loss that looks like a trough on your audiogram at 4khz. It is the classic noise induced audiogram. Dr.Nagler can tell you more about it.

 

@dan i feel like if i saw this site in the beginning of my T i wouldve known so much that i wouldnt be in the state as i am now as in really bad T..i also hear my T all day maybe not like urs but still i cant escape it i hear in the house ,outside, over the tv, driving my car.. etc..but i just stumbled on it 2 weeks ago and my docs told me not to visit forums as theyll just scare me more, like if he knew any better.. have u coped with ur T as it is now..is it common for a one ear T to turn into 2 ear T like mine did..

 

@dan what is central hyperactivity T ? is that the t u get when u get exposed to something as in u feel like a static type noise on top of ur head but goes away after a while?....

 

Yes it is common in fact, my t started exactly like yours, a mild distant ring in one ear I actually thought was funny and laughed it off. This was 2 months after the initial noise trauma. Then a second noise+stress trauma a month later opened the flood gates to heck, just boom as I woke up one morning.
It was stronger in one ear initially then became equal in both and louder.
I have heard many accounts of this spreading to the other ear - its is very common, but does not mean it has to happens all the time. I think it has to do with the type of tramua initiating the T.
Central T is just an expression of the final stage of tinnitus, that it has spread across the different areas in the brain - limbic system, auditory/sensory systems, cognitive systems...as opposed to the first day u hear the ringing, it has just crossed the threshold into awareness.

 

Yes, this forum is a massive knowledge and experience data base...there is even a makeshift drug trial going on here....behind the scenes collaboration with real tinnitus researchers....exchanging of experiences with all imaginable treatments old an new....exposing tinnitus scams... and much more.