Does Having Tinnitus Mean That You Have to Be Shy Around Normal Noises?

So I am on month 5 of tinnitus that seems pretty much bad pretty much all of the time. The cause is who knows? The ENT postulated that it was a vial event. I have some hearing loss, 45 dB at ~6 kHz but I don't think it was new, otherwise pretty normal hearing. My onset had nothing to do with noise as a trigger. I had not had any ringing in general and never due to a noise previous to the sudden 2 AM onset, and I really have no memory of any particular loud noises for as far as I can remember.

I have tried to be really careful with noise since onset, I carry ear plugs with me and don't really do anything in loud environments other than just generally being in an urban area.

Well this all leads up to the the following. In the last two weeks I have found myself in the following situations: a loud party where someone's little girls started screaming next to me a room, I walked next to a jackhammer doing its thing, and just now I was pumping a tire on my road bike and it exploded within a foot of my head inside a closed room-small caliber gunshot loud.

None of them have made any difference in my tinnitus, it sucked before and it sucked after. Don't get me wrong I intend to be careful and keep myself out of avoidable loud areas, but is it possible that if noise wasn't responsible for my tinnitus that I as not necessarily more vulnerable to loud noise than I was before?

Is it possible that i don't need to walk around on egg shells?

 

Depends, listen to your body. If sounds seem uncomfortable and cause your tinnitus to get louder then you may want to be careful.

 

You'll have various degrees of responses in here that map to how risk adverse people are.

Personally I keep using headphones (at low volume) and do not "walk around on egg shells", but I do head out if I enter a room that feels "too loud". Also unexpected noises happen (an ambulance siren, some motorcycle, a guy sneezing next to you, etc), but I don't particularly worry about it.

You'll also find people who'll recommend you use ear plugs everywhere, and who ask if opening a faucet or whispering in your ear could be dangerous to you.

It's all about what you feel comfortable with. If my tinnitus reacted to some "noise event", I'd probably try to protect against it.

 

@AfroSnowman

You have some significant hearing loss at 6KHz (45dB). I do not understand the living in denial of many T sufferers: I do not need hearing aids, and then hearing loss can not be the cause of the T. As long as you can not proof otherwise, the main suspect root cause of your T is hearing loss.
Exposure to every day noises should not be a problem for most people. Personally, I avoid situations that I know that are going to be very loud like concerts or very busy restaurants. If an ambulance passes by or I walk near a noisy construction site, I will just ear plug with my fingers, and I do not care what people might think. One of the risks is that as time goes by, one tends to lower the guard, and it is easy to get into very noisy situations, especially living in big cities or at noisy jobs. Living too paranoid about noises is another path to unhappiness.

 

Not everyone with tinnitus has hyperacusis, ear pain and all those extra symptoms you see discussed here. If that's you, then you may be one of the "luckier" ones (unless your tinnitus is really loud), and your tinnitus may eventually ease if you give it a chance. The occasional incident like you've described doesn't necessarily mean you've done any harm, but you should probably forget about going to concerts or into loud environments without protection for the time being at least.

 

yeah, tinnitus is mainly related to hearing loss, it does not need to be hearing loss in speech frequencies, it can be on the high range, 6kHz or more.

 

I guess what I mean to say with this is that I lived for quite some time (years?) with that hearing loss but no tinnitus at all. In fact my only exposure to Tinnitus as a thing was the running joke on Archer. I understand that the vast majority of people, something like 90%, with Tinnitus have hearing loss, but there are many, maybe most people with some hearing loss that do not have significant tinnitus.

It seems that for some people onset is specifically tied to a given traumatic event, meds or a noise event where the rising started. Others had a progression of slight Tinnitus that build up or changed over time. As I lived for years with that gap in my hearing with no Tinnitus at all and then without any Rx, known infection, or associated noise event I woke up at 2am with Tinnitus dialed up to about at 8 and it hasn't stopped since (better days/bad days blah blah blah), it seems something rather suddenly changed. That thing that changed I have no reason to believe was my hearing.

Of course hearing loss was a precondition to this happening, but I assume that something else occurred virally, neurologically, or environmentally that precipitated my current condition.

 

It Is possible that you don't need to worry about noise. It is also possible that you actually need to worry about it. Many of us believe that the cost (missing out on some loud events = several hours of fun) justifies the benefit [an increase (possibly a small increase) in the Chance that one's tinnitus doesn't get permanently worse].

 

I might sound like preaching about hearing loss as the default main T root cause. In fact, for a very long time I have thought that my T might not be hearing loss related. However, I have not been able to prove that I am correct, so I am left with the hearing loss path. None of the many doctors I visited gave me any credit, they all went through very routine tests, and if nothing found you have hearing loss no matter what (or just they have no idea what the cause can be). I live in Silicon Valley, and you will think that one will be able to find really good doctors here, but the experience was a total disappointment. All the doctors I found they were very conservative, and unwilling to try things. Every time I mentioned that my T could be related to a chronic microbial overgrowth they will just say that is impossible (without any data). Basically, the only way to prove the theory requires exploratory surgery to get sample middle tissue for culture, but no one will do exploratory surgery to prove this kind of hypothesis. You can read the whole story until early last year in the following thread:

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...er-taking-anti-fungal-drug.11142/#post-136722

My point is that if you think that your T is not from hearing loss you will have to be very proactive to get doctors that will troubleshoot the possibilities with some depth. Also, note that looking for the non-hearing loss cause or treat the T without confirmation of root cause can take you to very stressful situations. In my case, I was trying for several years and it all added to the burden of T. Especially when there is no success at the end of a very long path. I am not done yet (really???), but my default explanation now is “it must be hearing loss”.