Hello and Thank You!

Hello everyone,

This is my first post on this forum and thought I'd introduce myself. My name is Mike and up to a couple of weeks ago I have had very little problem with my ears.

However, a few weeks ago I started to feel some intermittent ringing in my ears. This was coupled with a pulsating sensation in my right ear. Although I felt the ringing wasn't too serious the pulsating sensation prompted me to change a few of my habits.

For example, for years when I was cooking I used a plate rather than a chopping board for chopping vegetables and meat. This produced a loud tapping noise every time I chopped something. I also used an old chopper/food processor regularly that was extremely noisy. As I do a lot of cooking this accumulated to a lot of loud noise exposure. So I began using a chopping board and I threw out the old food processor.

Unfortunately I was still using a set of earbuds earphones that stuck right into my ears. I listened to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts with these headphones and even brought them to the gym with me. As they have no noise cancellation properties and the gym music was very loud I set the volume level to very high. I was also in the habit of listening to audiobooks at night with these headphones and I would sometimes fall asleep with the audio still playing!!

I did this last Thursday week (10 days ago) and I woke up with this ringing in my ears (like a high-pitched 'eeeeee' sound) and hasn't stopped since. To be more specific the ringing is more on my left ear and not so much on my right. On the upside, since I stopped using the plate as a chopping board and the food processor, the pulsating feeling in my right ear has stopped.

So there has been a continuous ringing in my ear for just over a week now. In that week I think I have made a few mistakes. I live in a busy capital city so it is quite noisy and I have been out and about in town a few times. That means exposure to the usual city sounds of sirens and traffic et cetera. I also went to a "quiet" pub on Wednesday night. It was quieter than some pubs but still quite loud. The volume of ringing increased in my ear the morning after.

I also went to work on Friday with no ear protection. I work as a healthcare assistant in the hospital. As you know hospitals can also be very noisy places and as a consequence, on Saturday morning the ringing was louder than was the day before.

These last few days I've been reading ferociously about tinnitus mainly on these forums. This website is a MASSIVE help and have since decided never to wear headphones again based on the info here. It is also unlikely that I will ever go to a concert ever again as I feel the risk is just too high.

I have also bought some earplugs and earmuffs that were recommended throughout these forums to at least give some protection in this noisy city. I know wearing earmuffs and earplugs are a contentious issue here but I will leave this for another post.

I would just like to say that I'm immensely grateful for all the contributors of these forms for giving such valuable information to people like me who are new to this disease and looking for ways to try and cope. So again a massive thank you. I have loads of questions to ask but I leave that for another post

Cheers,
Mike

 

Welcome to the forum. Thank you for the kind words on this forum. We try what we can to help. Hopefully newer sufferers will focus on the positive aspect of this forum, such as the success stories and and the treatment/research information available here. Try to read up as many success stories as you can to keep up the hopeful spirit. Stay positive and give it some time. Take care. God bless.

 

I think you are on the right track now. Listen to the signals from your body and protect your ears as you wait for your T to fade. In the future you might consider increasing your exposure to noise gradually. If you get negative feedback (a spike), then you can back off.

Meanwhile, to ensure that you don't get hyperacusis as a result of overprotection, you may want to try to get exposed to some reasonable levels of noise on a regular basis. What had worked for me was watching TV at the moderate volume (which was the loudest volume I could listen to for several hours and not experience any problems later on). As a result, my H is now gone.