Hiya. Round 2 with tinnitus here.

I've been lurking here for awhile, watching from afar from the Yuku board. This place seems to have a vibrant and growing community so I thought I'd throw my chips in here and share my story.

On November 23, 2011, I woke up to a high pitched squealing in my ears along with an oscillating electrical hiss. The culprit was a Nintendo DS charger that had habit of emitting a high pitched whine after being fully charged stimulating my high pitched hearing to the pain threshold in my sleep, being triggered by a Dirt Devil being turned on on the floor below me. (Yes, I am probably the one person in human history that has or ever will have T from an Ace Attorney gaming marathon.)

Needless to say, this freaked me out to no end. Sleeplessness, anxiety, panic attacks, I was a wreck. I lost several pounds the first week. The squeal I'd started with morphed into all kinds of crazy warbling tonal "eeeeeeEEEEeeEE" noises over time and the electrical hiss was unpredictable and changed in intensity from hour to hour, ranging from being able to be masked by nothing but mild nature sounds to competing with the shower.

Just as bad, I'd discovered, was that certain things did NOT sound the same. I found that running water, fridge noise, really any kind of white noise produced a screechy overtone or morse code tones. CRT TVs now emitted an incredibly painful noise that joined in with my T and made it sound 10 times worse. My masking attempts were met with considerable frustration, and I never found anything that worked consistently.

But slowly, very slowly things began to improve. By 10 weeks in, all of the tonal noises I was experiencing had stopped completely. By 4-6 months in, the previously unpredictable electrical hiss had become much softer, much more stable, and followed a daily pattern, beginning practically silent in the morning, and somewhere a bit more annoying by late evening.

I was of course, disappointed that it never went away fully, nor did the "reactive noise" phenomemon (though that aspect did improve somewhat with the exception of CRT noise). All the same, I considered myself one of the luckiest sons of guns on Earth that I'd started with something so intrusive and ended up with what was (mostly) mild T. I couldn't tell you what I did aside from avoiding noise very consciousentiously (or perhaps I was one of the few people that lucked out from my doctor's Prednisone course).

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It stayed that way for a year and a half, and I was hoping that with caution it'd never get worse... but the universe had other ideas.

I'd injured my wrist in November (pins and needles, numbness, likely carpal tunnel from a bit too much computer gaming...). Was given Vicodin, and on November 19th of this year, I took one pill: 5 mg Hydrocodone / 500 mg Acetimenophen. 10 minutes later, I noticed my ears suddenly had a building sense of pressure in them, a sensation not unlike someone turning a knob in your chochleas. A sensation not unlike a threshold shift.

My immediate reaction , as you can imagine, was a panicked "OH CRAP"; I ran into silence, and noticed that my mild oscillating hiss was now brewing itself back into a high pitched electrical thunderstorm like "the good old days". Even the squeal had come back to my right ear. I immediately purged my stomach afterwards, but by that point the damage had been done.

Being over a month in now, the initial panic has washed over, but it's still a major monkey on my back, and there are still several times a day I feel like I'd take an ice pick to my brain to be rid of it. The quiet mornings I used to look forward to everyday are gone now, and the kindling effect everyday noise has on my T is obnoxious. And the reactive sound? Seems like everything provokes it now, even the ventilation system in my house...

I'm still holding out some hope that maybe lightning will strike twice and my T might resolve to it's previous level, but it feels distant at this point. I feel like my story would be a lot more inspirational without this major setback, but that's the way this cookie has crumbled.
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Anyhoo, I'll be peeping around here until either this settles or I "get used to it" (sigh). I wish I didn't have to be here, nor any of you. Tinnitus is a ridiculous affliction. God (and science) have mercy on everyone suffering with this.

With any luck I hope we'll all wake up to silent mornings again someday.

 

Hang in there man. I've been using this Acoustic CR app online (http://generalfuzz.net/acrn/) and it's been really useful for masking my tinnitus. Consider giving it a shot.

 

Thank you kindly for the welcome, Champ!

My baseline T hangs out somewhere in the 13-16k range, so masking it is a friggin' pain. On good days/hours I can pretty much ignore it with sufficient ambient noise, but on a bad day it'll cut through just about anything, like an electrically charged dog whistle. Problem is, I have very few good days anymore...

With these kinds of things I always start with the lowest possible volume, but I'll give it a try. Thanks for the welcome!

 

I've also visited the Yuku board in the past but it seems to have become more closed, requiring you to login to view, kind of the opposite you want to do when trying to give tinnitus as much publicity as possible and new sufferers a way to lurk before joining.

 

Yeah, I totally hear you there. I was really puzzled by the fact that they'd closed the board to public viewing.

I think there's some jerkwad out there that's DDOS'ing the site whenever it's made publicly viewable. They actually did change it back for a day and certain pages started accumulating tens of thousands of views overnight. Since Yuku works like a literal pay-per-view, those kind of shenanigans are a real problem.

And I'm so sorry to hear that T keeps throwing you the curveballs it has, LeQuack. You're in my thoughts a lot.

 

Thank you for those kind words.

 

Welcome welcome! Carpal tunnel syndrome is truly the worst enemy of a gamer. Few years back I got an overall upperbody carpal tunnel syndrome meltdown that I still feel as im writing this.. quite dramatic. Anyhow, im pretty sure I was put on one of those meds too, and woohoo, doped you were instead! I never thought of the culprit of sideffects back then though.
Tinnitus from ninento is quite an impressive one, but its fun you should mention the effecrs of watching and hearing tv and other devices. Before my t I got exactly, and now with t it is altered a bit but very present! Gods has funny ways of saying youll never catch em all
Which tones do you have currently?

 

Yeah. What sucks is I actually looked up that study saying that Vicodin could be responsible for hearing loss when abused before taking it, and I actually refrained taking it for several days because of that.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10733182

Then I figured I was just being paranoid since it said the only ototoxic part was the Tylenol in it (Tylenol can't hurt you obviously, me), it only mentioned that hearing loss occurred when abused, and my wrist was hurting like heck. Nope. That sucker screwed me up in one dose. Wish I'd have just toughed it out, since that's what I ended up having to do anyways.

Incidentally, my wrist is pretty much back to normal now. Just wish my T would do the same!

(And geez, I'm sorry you're still feeling it. What I had must've been pretty mild since it went back to normal so quickly... I kept my wrist in a brace almost 24/7 for over a month and it resolved on it's own.)

I think if what I got was divine punishment, just playing through Apollo Justice alone would have been a Dante-esque fate by itself.

But yeah, the sound distortion is a real pain, and is part of the reason I hardly even try to mask. I'm thinking it's some form of hyperacusis/recruitment. It's better on some days than it is others, mysteriously enough...

All the ones that matter!

Bilateral 13-16k hiss/squeal/whine (though stronger in my left ear most of the time), with a surging quality that waxes and wanes every several seconds. Previously it mostly stuck to the hiss (and was a lot better about not changing pitch all the time), but there's some kind of more annoying under/overtone to it now. Electrical "pewwweeeEEEEE" noises pop over that every so often as well. In a really bad phase, the hiss gets stuck on SURGE mode and I can't mask it with anything but a shower or sink at full blast. That usually only happens for a few hours at a time, but there have been a couple days where it's been nearly constant... those days are unfortunate ones.

My right ear also often gets an inconstant squeal-like tone in relative silence. Sometimes it's more prevalent, other times it's barely there, but a couple weeks ago I was getting full blown tonal T again there.

Also get an intermittent low warbling "wawawawawowobwob" sound like someone vibrating a thin steel sheet at a distance. Thankfully that one only happens in silence and doesn't bother me much. Sometimes I go for days without hearing it. That's been there for a lot longer though. I think eating a lot of salt triggers it.

Anyhow, I do hope that this is as bad as it gets for me, oi... seems like this forum is filled with people that have T for a lot of rare and unusual reasons.

Ear syringing, car bonnets, anime, Nintendo, orgasms, sometimes I wonder if there's anything you CAN'T get T from...

Thanks for the welcome!

 

It's a delicate balance of toughening up, some people are waiting it out for too long, some people don't and then they get it. Everything is a potential source to tinnitus it seems. A month is quite a while, well I'm not sure if mine was the same, it was a culmination turning into a hotchpotch of calamity leaving the doctors puzzled I'm really happy you healed that, the cost of tinnitus sucks though, and if it doesnt choose to go away, odds favor youll habituate and/or it will be effiecienty treatable at some point - There are different treatment available it's just so different what randomly works on one to another; some people use a neoromonics device, others a nintendo ^^ If it's not treating you nice, the first recommendable steps is seeing an ENT and audiologist, and then the successrate of cognitive behavioral therapy is worthy as another alternative
Those feared and incontrollable powers of nintendo.. divine intervention right there ;(
That's good, trying not to mask it in order to get used to it is the way forth, I have an around 16k one myself (in addition to a morse code on left + random hisses, eeeee spikes here and there) and nomatter what the high freq one is quite hard to mask anyway.
Doh, sounds like an entire skrillex song going on in you, a terrible kin, but hey, some people manages to like those sounds = ) so do not fear.

It's like with cancer yeah (just... in a very different way lol), potentially everything gives you that >.<
Some people have also spoken about electromagnetism giving tinnitus, sounds pretty cool in a way, and since everywhere you go there's a pocket with a smartphone, radiation is overwhelming + the nintendo effect, who knows.

Many great tips and tricks in here, good you joined!

 

Yeah, I was very, very lucky my first time around. I think part of my bad reaction to this is that it feels like I've lost so much ground after making such huge progress. If I slept long enough, I'd often get several minutes of complete silence on waking up before this whole incident. Even though it was usually only for a few minutes, it was refreshing and I just soaked those moments up. The first several hours after that were usually unbotherably low too. Now it feels like I've been locked out of silence forever, and it's a devastating blow after having spent months after my first onset to get back to that point.

My T is probably around twice as intense as it was before, but I still do get lower periods seldomly. Not to the point where it could almost disappear, as before, but I can at least get to a 2/10-3/10 sometimes. Problem is I only seem to get them when chilling in a very quiet environment for at least an hour or two. It's been making me pretty anti-social... can't even seem to watch TV without my T spiking on many days. My T itself doesn't actually bother me that much at night, but my days are still blah since I can hear it practically everywhere now once when the "kindling effect" kicks in and the anxiety/thought/irritation/worry about it all keeps me up.

As for CBT, I actually have the Henry & Wilson book, which is considered the gold standard in T management by many of the vets on Yuku:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0205315372/?tag=tinntalk-20

It helps a bit, and got me past a good chunk of the initial freakout stage, but I find reading it too much just puts my mind on my T in overdrive sometimes. Like, "holy crap, I can't believe things got bad enough for me to be going through this again". Ironic effect, but... highly recommended all the same.

I really don't think anything like TRT (or at least the white noise sound generator part) or Neuromonics would even work with me. I'm one of those weirdos where noise exacerbates my T and silence/sleep usually settles it down.

(Is it bad that I often just think that if I found the right meds I could tamp this thing down? Seems like certain benzos / anti-seizure meds work really effectively for some people... I feel like if someone just poured every possible combination in front of me I'd start taking them like M&M's to see if anything worked. Side effects seem like an afterthought with T distress. Though it's pretty ironic considering one pill put me here.)

And yeah, my T would probably put Skrillex out of work if I could just broadcast it out of my skull. I don't know if anyone would be able to tell the difference on some days.

I'm sorry you're in the same boat Tenna. Hope we beat this thing soon!