Fear My Tinnitus Will Get Worse After Going to a Café and Alarm Going Off

Hallo everybody.,

For a long time I was very stressed about my tinnitus, that I isolaed my self from places that normally wouldn't harm me, for example a caffe or walking to a noisy street. But since last month I decided to cool down a little bit and not to worry so much about it. So today I was for about 5 hours to a caffe with a lot of noise from people's voices and music, according to decibel app in mobile the noise was 60 to 70 decibels, but for my standards, being always in quiet enviroment, was very loud.

And as if this was not enough, on my way back home an alarm from roadworks went off (a very loud one), but I immidiately closed my ears with my hands and turned to a street to avoid the noise, and took my my hands off after I felt I was to a safe distance from the alarm. What most scares me, is that I could hear the alarm from quite a long distance, that means, when it first went off I was very near, and this could have made a real damage.

Now my tinnitus is stronger, but don't know if it is stress related or a real damage in my ears has occured. Would be a good idea to take cortisone pills? Since my tinnitus started on last March I have done it many times when I thought I was exposed to loud noises. What you usually do in such cases?

 

I think you will be fine.
The anxiety its caused you will add to the spike so do things to relax you and sound around you that your ears are ok with and soft music at night if needed.
Well done for going out in a caffee and continue doing that and building up more time out side and your confidence as you go further afield.
Give yourself nice treats and look forward to nice summer walks as you start building up to it now.
We can never know what sounds we will come across when out and about so dont worry about it and just think things like that do happen to us all.
You can always keep ear plugs with you but the main thing is just walk away or cover your ears.
Dont let this put you off or scare you .
Have a relaxing evening and dont worry

..lots of love glynis

 

Interestingly today I had a similar noise exposure: I let friends talk me into going to the fairground and have lunch at the beer tent. I thought, why not? Unfortunately the area in front of the beer tent (we couldn't go inside since we had a chain smoker with us) where the only free table was, was directly across from the bumper cars and they were blasting this insanely loud music. My phone app said 85 db and I managed to sit there for about two minutes with my fingers stuffed into my ears when someone took pity on me and directed us to a free table in a different corner that we hadn't seen. There the noise was about 60 to 70 db and I had to flee the area after about 20 minutes. And then I spent the remainder of the afternoon wringing my hands, fearing that tomorrow I would wake up with a permanent spike 100% over the baseline because I'm anxious like that and annoyed everyone else at the table (we had retreated to an ice cream parlour well away from the fairground by then).

Reading through the forums I suppose that such a short exposure time at relatively low db levels (compared to a concert or some such) might give me a slight temporary spike but then, I know that this spike will come regardless because I always get spikes when the weather changes and since today it was a wonderful sunny day and from tomorrow to Tuesday we'll be in for a lot of rain and a temperature drop of about 10 °C. For now, about four hours later the T hasn't increased, at least not by levels that couldn't be explained by the weather and my freaking out. Also, a friend said that I might have a bit more leeway than most sufferers because my T is not due to acoustic trauma but due to stress, anxiety and possibly a bad cold.

I also fear that my ears feel stuffy but I tested my hearing and I hear just fine (I'm the only person in the house who can hear the sound of the heater in the bathroom which is about 5 db and I can still hear it so my ears are perfectly alright). I know that this is most likely just hysterics but it's so hard to switch off the part of the brain that tells you that you made a BIG mistake and you'll suffer for the forseeable future for it. Bloody overactive brain.

I also took magnesium citrate and alpha lipoic acid which is the only thing I have here that might help.