How About Help?! Terrible Time Dealing with Tinnitus

My name is Michael, and I had a head injury in 1992 that resulted in my tinnitus. I was told that it would go away in six months, but no, it stayed with me for more than two years. Besides the noise, which I described as an angry teapot that no one seemed at all interested in turning off, I went through a significant personality change. I was a mountain biker, swimmer, and a weightlifter, and I was able to continue doing these things, but more and more as the noise continued, I became timid and fearful. As six months came and went, my hope took a dramatic turn for the worst, and I had periods of deep depression and extreme, near violent behavior. I was seeing a stress therapist who taught me biofeedback because the noise was on the right side of my head, and he showed me how to bring it to the center. I can hardly describe how much of a difference that made for me. After close to 2 1/2 years the tinnitus left. The stress and anxiety, as well as my moodiness mostly left, but more importantly, the noise that badgered me for so long was gone.

About a year ago, while I was at home, someone down the street was using a chainsaw, and they used it all day and into the evening. Then I realized that the tinnitus came back, but I didn't mind because it was faint, and I used to be a logger so the sound was kind of pleasant and nostalgic, if that makes sense. A few weeks ago the shrill noise came back, and it's every bit as loud as when I was hit on my head, and I'm having a terrible time dealing with it. Nothing helps me overcome the noise except for taking a shower with the usual splash of the water to cover the sound.

I've never really talked with anyone who has had tinnitus, and to be honest, I don't know if everyone suffers the same degree of noise, which seems like I'm just a little whiner, or if... I don't really know what I should ask, if there is anything to ask. I have to say that the noise went away a couple of times, but it always comes around again.

Sorry for the long complaint, like all of you, I don't want this.

 

Hi @Michael alm

First off, no you're not a whiner. It's pretty amazing that your tinnitus went away the first time. If it did once, there's a chance this may happen again. It almost sounds like your brain found a way to rewire itself back to silence.

If you search around this forum you will find there are new treatements being developed with a solid success rate that may help you too e.g. Neuromod, Uni of Michigan and Uni of Minnesota or Otonomy.

Be careful though as to whose advice you're going to follow on this board. There's misinformation around, and some believes are heavily based on only a couple of postings from this forum.

 

Welcome to the forum. Sorry for your suffering with the latest spike. Generally spikes will settle down to baseline, especially if you can find the cause of the spikes. Do you know what has triggered the spike? Sometimes the cause may not be known but T will still likely settle back to baseline. The main thing is try not to freak out as humanly possible as you can. This is to prevent triggering the limbic nervous system from taking over and you will function in fight or flight mode which tends to make us perceive T much louder. Give it some time to see if the spike will settle. If it has gone away, it is a good chance it may do it again. In the mean time, you may want to try masking your T with some high frequency nature sounds, such as heavy rain, running water, waterfalls, cicadas etc. You can also try blue noise, white noise etc. Search youtube you will find many masking sounds. Good luck. Take care. God bless.

 

Were you exposed to any moderate noises? Have you been taking any ototoxic medications?
http://hlaa-sbc.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Ototoxic_Brochure.pdf

If it went away once, there is a good chance that it will go away again. Just try to not expose yourself to noises like a chainsaw. Ears take forever to heal, so the fading might take 6-24 months...

Check out
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...eone-else-who-has-tinnitus.26850/#post-307822

If yours doesn't fade, there is a chance that we will have a cure soon

 

More like "countless".

 

You are saying this, despite the fact that this person believes that he got his tinnitus back after a 24 year pause as a result of being exposed to distant chainsaw noises. Amazing.

 

More like only your biased and idiotic thread "Learn from others' mistakes."

The only "amazing" thing is that you are still allowed to continue with your bs on this forum. You have the cheek to ask me to provide "references" for what I say here when all you have yourself is anecdotal evidence, oftentimes taken out of context without you even knowing the full picture. This was explained to you like a million times over by other members here. I thought a university lecturer/professor would surely know better? Then you shoot this collection of bad examples to newcomer's intro post because in your words "It'd would make sense that blah blah blah"

If you want to rely heavily on someone's personal testimony, alright. But I want to hear it from that person preferably discussed in their thread so I can ask questions, and again get a better picture. The way you go about this is totally wrong, "professor." Your other views on socializing, sex, the way how you "care" about others yet when they don't listen to your bs you in turn openly wish them that they learn the hard way, when you disagree with someone you're slapping those laughing emoticons on their posts... all of this tells me that there's something off about you.

Note: If you closely you will notice that I do base a lot of my suggestions, or when I try to comfort someone else on here, on sources that I trust myself and that are evidenced-based. A far cry from what you do.

By the way why recommending Prednisone is not always ok was brilliantly explained to you in this thread (you may want to reread it): Toilet Lid Noise and Corticosteroids?

I guess you noticed that some of your postings directed to me here were deleted. For a good reason. Get off my case.

@Michael alm I don't want to derail your thread by this. Sorry about that. You might see there are people around here who suffer a lot and are very open about it - that is perfectly ok, it is a health forum. What is not ok is unhealthy advice that has a lot of people climbing the walls. The prime representative of scare tactics and misinformation is @Bill Bauer so please, try not to listen to him.

 

Hi; I want to thank everyone for the responses and to make a clarification.
I had a head injury, not exposure to chainsaw noise.
Thanks for the suggestions for the various possible cures, I'll look into them and share them with my doctor. I'm not sure how much she does or doesn't know about tinnitus.
At the time of my injury, there was very little available information on tinnitus and the PC was still a number of years from its debut. Kind of funny,
I went to a support group one evening, and I was the youngest person there by about twenty years. No one to really relate to, I never went back. Now I'm close to the age of those people, and I wonder what another support group would be like now?
Once again, I thank you for your responses and insights.

 

Thank you for making this clarification.

You're welcome. I asked my doctor and she replied to me that the best you can probably do now is to make an appointment with an Otoneurologist. Try to get treated there. Not a standard ENT.

With regards to the forum, you can spend some time around to see what the culture is like. There are definitely some wonderful people here, on that note there also members here who are poison.

 

Totally agree. -- You can avoid these members and much of their unnecessary negativism by using the "ignore" feature. I prefer not to use it, but find it necessary at times.

 

Hi Michael alm -- Sorry to hear how difficult your recent spike has been after so many years. Just for clarification, you're saying the distant chainsaw noise had nothing to do with your recent spike? If not, do you know what did cause the spike? -- Thanks.

 

Hi everyone; I'm not a prolific writer, so maybe I didn't make myself very clear with my first post. The chainsaw noise that I heard last year was Tinnitus. It sounded like a distant chainsaw. I haven't been exposed to actual chainsaws since the 1980's. The noise I heard was all in my head, so to speak. My tinnitus was caused by a wooden pallet falling off a stack of pallets. The tinnitus began the next morning. Kinda like a 24/7 alarm clock that when you toss it out the window, it walks right back in the front door.

 

That was just the tip of an iceberg. I haven't been saving those testimonials for a while now.

You hjaven't addressed the irony of you telling someone whose T got resurrected after 14 years as a result of exposure to a sound you would consider to be moderate or minor, that they should not listen to advice to stay away from moderate noises.

Anecdotal evidence can't be used to estimate the probability, but it can be used to establish that this probability is nonzero. "This was explained to you like a million times over"

You can click on the up arrow at the top of each of the quotes, and see the origianl thread and ask questions there.

There should be a dislike button, until we get one - use the LOL emoticon.

I Haven't noticed. This just proves that "your side" is resorting to asking moderators to delete posts that they can't debate. You did it with "learn from others' mistakes" thread, and I got it reinstated. This provides more information about your side than it does about my posts.

People should take a look at
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/learn-from-others-mistakes.29437/
and make up their own mind.

As for an explanation for the posts like the one above, see
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/why-do-some-people-hate-bill-bauer.27106/

What is happening here is that I am advising against being reckless. It works for many/most? people. Unfortunately, some people's ears got damaged so much that being easy on their ears doesn't promote hearing. Those people then go on to tell newbies that it is ok to be reckless and to stop listening to the people advocating against recklessness. We should feel sorry for those people, but also understand what is motivating them to make those posts.

 

You can't blame me for misinterpreting the above. I wish you were to write "when I was at home, I Thought I heard someone using a chainsaw down the street".

 

Bill (Bauer); I don't, nor ever did lay any kind of blame on you or anyone for not understanding what I so poorly described. I reread my first post and, holy cow(!), it made no real clarification of what I was trying to say. There was no neighbor - it was my assumption that someone was using the imaginary chainsaw, when it was actually my tinnitus. It seemed so real.
Please forgive me for my poor, confusing story

 

Maybe consider more treatment for shear strain as being a diffuse axonal injury which can produce “multi-system” neurobehavioral symptoms. This goes physically beyond the biofeedback that you received from a therapist.

The Digit Span Backward Test shows the best positive predictive power in differentiating TBI. From this a physical therapy program can be established.

 

Thank you for the suggestion, Greg. I don't know if there were very many treatments available when I had my injury. If there were, they weren't made known to me. Axonal injury? I had to Google that one. About a year after I had my accident was given an MRI that showed nothing. I was expecting to see little cartoon characters blowing whistles or some such thing, but I think they were hiding behind the images.

 

True. A tip of an iceberg in that you keep saving and bringing up the worst case scenarios you find online, which really isn't representative of the group, and seem to ignore to a great extend the positive good examples.

True. Let me address it now. The OP suffered a head injury. Not a noise trauma. You jumped into a conclusion right away and got it wrong. Then you accused me. That's the irony here.

You need to read more on how anecdotal evidence works, if you want to include it in an emperical and verifiable study. You count in all of the samples, and not just some of them, the way you do - otherwise it's called cherry picking (fallacy of incomplete evidence).

It's a health forum. People come here for support, not to get dislikes or laughed at. It could easily turn into some bully, and his ass-kissing minions wreaking havoc on otherwise good quality info. The report button is enough.

Doubt it. Very likely you have noticed. The reason why your posts got removed so quickly was because you were putting words again into my and @Ed209 's mouth. I guess the admins realized fairly quickly what was going on.

Ok, cool. People then should also look here, and read from the page 4 onwards to get even a better picture to help them make up their mind: Protecting? Overprotecting? Not Protecting?

The other thread you mentioned, well, its name kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it? I know you like to point people to that one comment by @threefirefour . @AZeurotuner or @Julien87 also made some excellent points in the thread.

And while they're at it, may be they could also take the time to have a look on how you advise others on Prednisone usage, e.g. the thread where a girl was worried that a pillow popped her ear:

(seriously, reread the thread where a cancer research scientist explained to you why Pred is not safe)

What is more likely happening here is that you're just feeding your own ego to the detriment of others. Aside from the obvious (like not going to loud concerts/places), which should be frankly true of everyone, your advice is sometimes more ototoxic than NSAIDs. I tried to address all of your points. I hope you're happy now.

 

You are missing the point of why I am posting those quotes. Those quotes prove that the risk does exist. I have already pointed this out today. If you are not going to actually read and think about my arguments, there is no reason to talk to you.

People do the above to estimate probabilities.

People publish "case studies" to establish that something can cause T. For example
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1990-20517-001

http://sci-hub.tw/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0269881107082126

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378608005801850

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3357564/

https://journals.lww.com/headtrauma..._Transcranial_Magnetic_Stimulation_for.6.aspx

http://www.tinnitusjournal.com/arti...encephalography-and-tinnitus-a-case-study.pdf

In all of the above, the published studies looked at a sample with 1 observation - one patient. This would be ludicrous if they were trying to estimate any probabilities. But, as they state above, they report potential T triggers and potential cures.

You will also notice that those researchers appear to "cherry pick" - they haven't reported any other patients who took antidepressants and were ok. This is because they were not trying to estimate How dangerous amitriptilyne is, they were trying to estimate Whether it Could be dangerous. In other words, when they published those studies, and when I quoted those posts, we were attempting to do the same thing.

You wrote something about knowing the kind of a man that I am. It will be interesting to see what kind of a man You are, by seeing whether you will apologize for your posts (that are clearly ridiculous in light of the case studies cited above).

Don't make laughable statements and you won't be laughed at.

So democracy is bad, less information is preferable to more information, everyone who disagrees with you are ass-kissing minions. Got it.

See, you think that you had "won". This is hilarious. If any newbie is reading this, please read the latter pages in that thread and laugh with me.

I realize that English is not your native language. So let me explain to you what I was saying to that girl - she said that she was Fine (i.e., no spike, no ear fullness). I explained to her When it is a good idea to take Prednisone: if one gets new tones, or a significant increase in volume, or ear fullness (a very serious symptom!) - THEN should seriously consider taking Prednisone. So since I was responding to her saying that she didn't have any of those symptoms, my advise to her was to NOT take Prednisone.

Yes, Prednisone has serious side effects. For those people who will be committing suicide (or whose quality of life would fall and remain down for the rest of their lives) if their T were to get any louder, it would be worth it to take Prednisone if there was a chance that it might decrease such a horrific outcome.

My ego? What are you talking about?

The one thing about my job that I hate is that I have no chance but to do the things that others might call "feeding ego". I get More than Enough of that - the last thing I Need is more of it.

I am happy. Are you?

 

To clarify the above - what matters are the symptoms and not the trigger. If someone gets heart attack symptoms after shoveling snow, it would not be a good idea for that person to dismiss his or her symptoms just because shoveling snow is normally safe for the majority of people. If one gets a serious symptom, one should act accordingly.

 

@Bill Bauer "We investigated the QEEG changes after an unexpected remission of tinnitus in a male individual who suffered the disorder for 3 years."

Bill, An updated study was done.

In conclusion, functional changes as demonstrated by source localized QEEG are not reflected by associated structural changes. Specific tinnitus characteristics are also not reflected by structural changes. The VBM results obtained on tinnitus might not be directly related to tinnitus related factors, but instead to hearing loss and hyperacusis.

 

Yes, some "case studies" will end up reporting possible cures (or causes) that later end up being proven to not be true. But the fact that those studies are published, shows that, in general, there is value to them. In the absence of studies with a large sample, we can either ignore information, or we can choose to use all information that is available to us, including the case studies.

 

@Bill Bauer - I agree, although I do value case studies on physical tinnitus more than many research studies.

Of the 12% per physical tinnitus that have received dismissal from this disease is mostly from treating cross pattern causes. There are a few exceptions and one is ear wax. The same for the 25% whom have received a solid T deduction as being from cross pattern physicals. I have been flow charting physical cross patterns for some time and they are predictable with back and forth signaling. Fluid travel, nerve response, posture input and most injuries are very high on multi-system lists.

 

@Michael alm Well, I guess an apology is in place to you for hijacking your intro thread now. What you can see here, though, only demonstrates what I tried to warn you about when you asked what this support group is like. The real problem with this forum, in my opinion, lies within a few fear mongering individuals who spend their entire existence here and are misinterpreting any kind of evidence (factual or circumstantial) to benefit their agenda. For example, the poster with whom I had an argument above used your case in another thread to prove his point while purposely leaving out important bits in the quotation - like that your tinnitus was caused by a head trauma, not noise. They are missing the point that using a few case examples on a tinnitus forum (taken out of context without knowing the full picture, in addition) to establish whatever in a world where literally hundreds of millions of people have tinnitus: [1] is flawed logic to say the least. Did you notice how he still got the link for the thread 'Learn form others' mistakes' to your intro thread? Clever. Sadly, he does this to almost every newcomer. Dude has got an uncanny knack for manipulating the audience. What's worse is that this unqualified maniac sees fit to give advice/”explain” to other people in distress on when to use drugs like Prednisone that have many bad side effects and can do much more harm than good. It’s an M.D. who assess the situation, not some internet rando. This guy goes to such lengths even to advise others here to lie to their own physicians so they can get a hold of this drug (you can use the search function here to see for yourself). When I showed this to real professionals in the field (a clinical pharmacist and a military ENT) they were both outraged by how it is allowed for some incompetent, anonymous person to openly give such recommendations. This behavior borders on the legal limits, if it's not outside the law already.

You may also notice that when others feel threatened here they often resort to snarky remarks, and personal attacks - so be careful about the kind of information you share with others. As you can see above, Bauer finds a lot of things hilarious, amazing, and what not. That's disturbing. One could easily be arguing here with a kid who's got mental issues in the real world other than tinnitus. Profile locked, username, and a weird avatar = all available info.

Once again, I'm sorry for all of this but I felt you should know. Feel free to p.m. me and I'll gladly share with you what I know. @Lane's ignore button recommendation is in place for sure. Seek out that otoneurologist, if you can. These people are worth following imo here: @yonkapin @kelpiemsp @Steve @Starthrower @Jack Straw

 

Well said, Jiri. Your post highlights the importance of seeking medical advice from a professional, and it still concerns me how many people on here go and get prednisone at the drop of a hat.

You’re a good guy and have always shown a lot of integrity. I hope you can turn your situation around and find some happiness again; nobody deserves it more.

 

@Ed209 -- Just a quick mention: -- A friend of mine is currently dealing with a serious neurological disorder called CIPD (see brief description below at THIS SITE). He recently mentioned to me that prednisone is sometimes prescribed for it, but after he took only a single dose, it took him several months to recover from the deleterious effects--I'm not even sure if he's fully recovered yet. I know prednisone can work great for some people for some things, but wanted to at least post this cautionary note. -- @Bill Bauer

Summary

Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) is a rare neurological disorder in which there is inflammation of nerve roots and peripheral nerves and destruction of the fatty protective covering (myelin sheath) over the nerves. This affects how fast the nerve signals are transmitted and leads to loss of nerve fibers. This causes weakness, paralysis and/or impairment in motor function, especially of the arms and legs (limbs). Sensory disturbance may also be present....

 

How do I activate the "ignore" feature?

 

Hi @Psych -- At the upper right section of the website, you'll see three different categories: 1) Your Username; 2) Inbox; and 3) Alerts.

Click on your username link. On the right side you'll see a list to links of actions you can take. One of these links titled "Ignore" takes you to the section where you can place members on that list.

When I first signed up with this forum, I used it a handful of times. Since then, the "Ignore" feature has disappeared from my menu of options. I don't know why, and don't know if other members have similar problems. Just wanted to mention that however if you can't find the Ignore feature link.