Hello!

My name is Laurel and I've been living with tinnitus for 15 years. I've never been especially bothered by it because it was, until 2 months ago, relatively inaudible (if that's the correct word since really, it's not a real sound, is it?); I was only aware of my tinnitus when reading, while listening to classical music, or during especially quiet scenes of a movie.

For no reason I can discern, except maybe the sublimated stress of hiring into a new position at my place of employment after 15 years (ah..see, there might be a correlation) of performing the same job function, I began hearing the tinnitus, first above the radio while driving to and from work, and then, frustratingly, at work., at home, everywhere, all day long.

I scheduled an appointment with an ENT without realizing that most ENT's don't offer any treatment options. The ENT examined me for maybe 5 minutes before handing me off to an audiologist. After my hearing test, I was informed that I had moderate hearing loss in my left ear, and somewhat milder loss in the right. She fitted with hearing aids that also had a white sound device in them and allowed me to give them a test run for a week. After 3 days, I took the aids off because I couldn't tolerate how loud everything sounded and found that my tinnitus seemed to be increasing in volume when I used the white noise device. On Friday, 5/24, I experienced a near panic attack at work. The tinnitus was screeching in my head like a tea kettle. I was trembling and unable to perform my job. Luckily, I only worked a half day due to the follow-up appointment with the audiologist. When I told her about my panic attack and about the volume and intensity of my tinnitus (it felt like my head was vibrating), she only then informed me that she was not trained to treat or offer any coping strategies for tinnitus.

I was going to schedule an appointment with the Cleveland Clinic, but found a group of audiologists closer to home that offer various therapies including Neurmonics and Widex devices and go for an initial appointment on Friday of this week.

I'm glad to have found this forum because it offers such a wealth of information about tinnitus therapies/treatments and ongoing research.

After having scanned through and read a lot of the content in the various forums here, I was wondering if there was a thread devoted specifically to each individual's attempted treatments and therapies and if any of them helped in habituation to the tinnitus. If such a thread exists, can you point me in its direction? If not, it'd be wonderful if active members might considering starting such a thread that answers such questions as: What treatments/therapies have you attempted or are currently attempting, what impact negative or positive did these treatments/therapies have on your tinnitus, have you found that without treatment the intensity/volume/frequency of your tinnitus has remained constant or decreased with the passage of time, etc.

I know that my tinnitus won't go away. I've lived with it for 15 years. I'm hoping that I can retrain my brain to ignore it again with the aid of sound therapy.