Fleeting Tinnitus That Is Not a Pure Tone?

I was in the shower and noticed a weird new sound. I tested whether it was a new tinnitus sound and yes it was! Very loud low static in my right ear.

I of course panicked and walked around like a caged animal for a while and it seems to have faded almost to nothing in a few minutes although it's still there. So it behaved like fleeting tinnitus - one sided, came out of the blue, loud, then faded rapidly. However fleeting tinnitus was always a pure tone for me.

Did anyone else experience fleeting tinnitus that is not a pure tone but something else like static?

I have not been exposed to any loud sounds, taken any new meds, had barotrauma, been ill etc over the past several weeks so none of the usual tinnitus triggers - completely unexpected.

 

Anyone? It would be great to have some confirmation that this is normal...

Btw a night has passed and the sound didn't return, my T is at baseline, but I'm still gripped by panic and couldn't sleep much.

 

@hans799
Not so much fleeting tinnitus, but I do occasionally experience a variety of sounds now & then along with my baseline tinnitus tone. After so long, I've just come to accept it and hope it's gone by the next day. It usually is.
Hoping it passes completely for you, Hans.

 

Hi,
I've had exactly the same a few days ago , I'm 9 months into tinnitus.
It was a low hum with a feeling of fullness but subsided after a while.
Lately I have a lot of fleeting T , with or without fullness but always had it it with a high tone.
Even only had the fullness without the tone a week ago , it woke me up in the middle of the night

 

So you also had a fleeting tinnitus that was fullness + low hum, right?

It is almost always a high tone for me, too, and occasionally just the momentary fullness without a tone, so both these are "normal" I think. I hope that the low hum fleeting T is normal, too, I just didn't experience it before and that's why it was so frightening.

 

By the way I just found this thread:

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/low-frequency-fleeting-tinnitus.12012/

Apparently, others have low-frequency fleeting tinnitus, too. So it DOES seem to be a normal experience, although it's rare. And apparently others are just as shaken by it as I was.

 

Yes, I never had this low hum before, it happened on new Year's Eve when I walked from outside to inside .
It luckily got better , maybe because I didn't focus on it because we were having dinner with family , had another fleeting tone yesterday but it was a high tone again .
I've been having this fleeting T every two weeks I guess and start getting used to it , only I am having trouble with a kind of feeling of fullness now since a few days

 

Might have something to do with temperature changes - mine happened in the (hot) shower not long after coming home from the cold.

Anyway there seem to be at least 4-5 people who had this: you, 3 other people on the thread I linked, and me, and it seems no-one was harmed by it. So it's probably harmless. Another funny little trick in the Tinnitus Joker's catalogue.

What kind of fullness? I had ear fullness for a while and it seems to have been the tensor tympani muscle contracting, which is a protective reflex that the ear does when it detects damage (impact noise, cold etc). Have you been exposed to something similar? My fullness resolved without issue.

 

Well it comes and goes which is really strange, I can only explain it like something is sucking air from the inside of my ear.
I tried the popping manoeuvre by pinching my nose and swallowing and only one ear gets filled with air.
I don't expose myself to loud sounds and never go into loud places .
I have some hyperacusis but manageable.
I hope this resolves because it's really annoying

 

Is your hearing affected (dulled, muffled etc) or is it just a physical sensation with unaltered hearing?

 

Did it resolve on its own ? And do you have hyperacusis?

 

Haha yes I also have a menagerie of sounds that come and go randomly. Their pitch and character varies wildly, but their volume is always constant. Like there is a "budget" of sound and it gets "spent" in various ways, but the "sum" of the sounds is always the same. I'm used to it by now, too. This fleeting crap was scary because it was so LOUD.

Let's hope the new devices coming out will thin out our zoos of sounds...

 

Yes only a physical sensation, I read somewhere it could be caused by stress ?

 

Indeed it can. Check this page out: https://www.everydayhearing.com/tonic-tensor-tympani-syndrome/

The fact that your hearing isn't muffled is great news, I think: that means there's no hair cell/nerve damage. It's just the muscle contracting. Which might be annoying but it's not causing any actual damage, plus it can also be unclenched by muscle relaxants etc. So I think you've got nothing to worry about, it'll pass without any consequent problems like mine did.

 

Ok , thanks a l

ok thanks a lot for the info ,
I read about TTTS but I thought that you needed to hear clicking and have a fluttering sensation in your ears , I did not know that the fullness can be a symptom on its own .
I thought I had ETD but I've never had problems with ear infections or sinuses or colds in my whole life and I am in my 40`s.
It's unbelievable what ears can do to us

 

Yes, it's a really nice gesture from evolution or whatever that we have these organs in our heads that are 1.) amazingly fragile and 2.) take years (if ever) to heal. Eyes need to look at a literal nuclear explosion to burn out. Ears will get screwed by loud music. One of the design teams needs to be fired.

 

Are you from the Netherlands Hans ?
Dan kan ik ook in het Nederlands communiceren maar daar heeft de rest van het forum weinig aan natuurlijk

 

Nope, I'm Hungarian.

However, I can understand your second sentence, although I don't speak Dutch! My German seems to be helping out

 

Ah ok, funny because Hans is a typical dutch name

 

Realizing after a poll here that I'm one of the few unlucky ones who gets daily "attacks" of fleeting T... I can assure you that all kinds of pitches and noises can appear, not only the static high-pitch noise, though it seems to be the most common type.

 

Thanks - and sorry to hear you get so many of these. Do they still scare you, or are you mostly used to them?

 

Not so much now as opposed to before, but some are louder and last longer than usual. Those tend to get me a little bit more worried.

 

Which part of the experience lasts longer? The loud part or the "long tail"?

I occasionally have fleeting T episodes that leave a "residue" that can stick around for hours. Those are real doozies, especially if they start at night.

 

Same here with the " residue "

 

I'm familiar with this too but how my fleeting T behaves can be very varied.

 

Hey guys @Elinor @hans799 do you guy still get fleeting tinnitus? Or did that stop?

 

I still get fleeting tinnitus, although it seems to be occurring much less since I've been doing the Lenire treatment.

Mercifully it's always a pure tone and always goes away without residue nowadays.

 

Do you have normal tinnitus still? And did the fleeting tinnitus start before or after you got normal tinnitus?

 

Still have the normal tinnitus.

I was born with the normal T so they started at the same time. However, fleeting T is known to be an annoying yet harmless phenomenon that happens to everyone, including people who don't have chronic T.

 

So lately I also got the low-frequency fleeting tinnitus from time to time, but only in my left ear where I also developed an additional low-frequency tinnitus over the years. But this can be masked good during daytime.

But for some weeks now I used to have fleeting tinnitus that sounds like a drill at the dentist. It's just horrifying. The last one yesterday. In the morning I had my monthly visit at my osteopath doing this craniosacral thing. I felt pretty relaxed after that. Then in the evening I had a longer gaming session on PC. While gaming this bad drill fleeting tinnitus appeared. Since then my tinnitus is on full throttle. The night was pure horror. Tinnitus is again louder than before.

I still don't know what to do. Hope I can get a Lenire appointment soon.