Back for Support — In the Depths of Despair with Worsening Hearing Loss and Tinnitus

I remember you too How many tones do you have now? If I concentrate (some of my sounds morph together with others because of how close in pitch they are), I am up to 15.

 

Sounds like my story.

 

I feel your pain as my story is very similar to yours.

But we need to try and stay confident that we can get back to this good place. We have done it before so we know it is possible. We have done it before and will do so again. Time is a healer. It will just be a temporary setback towards the roads to success. Never give up hope.

 

Wow 15 is a lot! I don't know exactly how many sounds I have. I have 5 or 6 tones that I can hear most places, two of which are unmaskable. If I'm in a quiet place or have earplugs in, I have a handful of other tones. Those lower tones seem to pop up and increase in volume if I'm not well rested or have been exposed to loud noise. I try to not count or even acknowledge the ones that I only hear in quiet places, and like you said, some of them sort of meld together. Some of them are constant, but others are non-static. Some beep off and on, it's difficult to describe what those sound like but I have found them to be the most bothersome.

I don't think I have as severe of hearing loss, but I have lost a lot of my high frequency hearing. I also get this weird thing when doing hearing tests where I will hear certain frequencies at low volume, but it doesn't sound like a pure tone, there is this distortion when the tone is at a low volume. The distortion isn't present at higher volumes, only when it gets close to my hearing threshold. I don't know if that means I'm beginning to lose my hearing in that frequency range or what.

 

I had that experience with my audiology test and my audiologist said it is likely feedback from damaged hair cells. The sound hits them and because they are damaged they make a sort of feedback noise. So likely you have some hair cells in your cochlea there that are already damaged

 

O lovely. But thanks for the information. Feedback is a good way of describing the sound. My audiologist/ENT just shrugged their shoulders.

Sadly that's in the 2-4 kHz range where I previously had zero hearing loss. I did have that when I did a ultra high frequency hearing test years ago, but only at the very high frequencies back then.

I'm curious, do you experience that feedback in a lot of frequencies or just one?

 

Usually I only get the feedback during audiology tests because they give pure tones for the most part. I can't tell you what tones those are but maybe I can get my audiologist to give me a copy of my next hearing test. My hearing loss is soooooooo bad. I'm amazed I can still hear speech.