I Hate ENTs!

I've been having tinnitus for 9 years now. I went to see an ENT a few weeks after onset and basically got told that there is nothing to be done, learn to live with it and if you need more info about T you can use Google.

So after a couple of years I'd rather not remember I managed to go on with my life until January this year when my T worsened and struck back with a furious vengance for beeing ignored for a couple of years. I went to my GP and he sent me to an ENT and after a few months of waitin (don't you just love the Swedish health care system) I finally got an appointment at an ENT wich was yesterday.

When I got there. He shook my hand, asked me to tell my story and why I was there. Then he looked into my ears with his little flashlight magnifying glas or whatever they use, shook my head for 20 sec and then looked at my eyes to see if I had virtigo and then he said the magic words: "I'm sorry Mr. but there is nothing I can do for you. You just have to learn to live with it."

WHY THE FLYING F**K ARE PEOPLE WITH T. BEING SENT TO SEE DOCTORS THAT CAN'T DO SH**T FOR THEM!!!!???

Why are ENTs being seen as the doctor to go to for your T.? I think we from now on should just call then NTs! They can't do anything that has to do with ears anyway except telling people to live with it. Well I don't need to see a specialist doctor for that one. I could have gone to see any stranger in town and ask them what I should do about my T. I'm sure I would have gotten pretty much the same answer, if not better.

Just so frekkin' mad right now!

 

I went to see some prof today, specialising in inner ear disorders, when she heard I don't get dizzy but "only" have tinnitus she said there's no cure for that!
Oh, that's a news to me

She asked if I know what tinnitus is and if I was given any brochures?
WTF??? WTF????
Please somebody shoot me now!!!

No b...h, I don't know what tinnitus is! Please tell me!!! Give me a f.....g broushure to read about it coz living with it 24/7 obviously doesn't count!

$220 later for what was ment to be an hour appointment but was cut short (by me coz I couldn't listen to that BS) to half an hour, but no shame in charging me the full fee.
I cried my way to home

 

I went to an ent today and he just said it will get better and that's all.

How come yours got worse?

 

I don't really know how or why it got worse. I have been really careful with protecting my ears when needed since the onset of my T. But the thing about T. is that if you have T. due to hearing loss or some other damage then it won't ever get better. It will probably only get worse as you age and get more and more hearing loss. That's the sad part about T.

What can happen is that you habituate, you adapt. But the sound of your T. never gets any better. Only your response to it. The sound can only get worse as the years go by but you habituate, you adapt. I've managed to do it once.

And if you don't there are two possibilities: 1) Blow your head off or 2) you isolate your self and live out your life high on meds to keep yourself from doing nr 1.

All hope is not lost though. There is research being done and only in the last few years there has been more publications and more work done than in decades prior to that. So the hope is for a treatment or drug to come out. There are a few that are being tested in trials as we speak so let's pray and hope. But in the meantime your only option is to "live with it"...

 

My ENT is sending me for a CAT scan. He also told me and my husband to hold off on getting hearings aids. My T came down on me like a roaring lion last Fenruary. It morphed from that to a watery, crackling sound. I think from the story I described to him about my T, I got the gut feeling he knows something is going on inside the ear. My family Dr. Said "We are all getting older, hearing aids will help." REALLY I THOUGHT, as I cried my heart out that this man must know what he is talking about. Left his office and decided that he could go f himself. Decided to call the ENT myself. I am so sorry you are going through this. My T had calmed down a lot since it first began. But anything can change. Can you go to another Dr?

 

I see that you haven't had T. that long. In the first year you will experience improvements. As did I. But after a while the T. sets and from that point onward there's only one way to go unless they come up with some treatment. There doesn't have to be worsenings. Some people live their whole lives without it getting worse but to my knowledge it doesn't go the other way.

I've lived with this crap for 9 years. And the thing is there are poor people that have had it even worse then me for much longer. Often when I think of those kind of people I force my self to get it together and tough it out. But the thing is I have very little joy in my life. Sure I enjoy things still. But the tinnitus sortof puts a smere on everything.

If I watch a really good movie or I hear a good song or have a nice moment with a friend or my girlfriend. I enjoy it, ofcourse. I even laugh. But the thing is that most of the time I think to my self: "This is really nice. But it would shure be a lot better if I didn't have this constant ringing in my head to put it's ugly mark on it all."


Accually I have divided my life into two eras. B.T. (before tinnitus) and A.T. (after tinnitus). And those two are not to be compared. For me it's not always the sound itself. It's the fear. Not being able to tell if today is the day that some idiot decides to light a firecracker next to me or a car gets a flat tire that explodes and worsens this thing. It's that constant feeling of not being in control. Not knowing if it might spike again or if that spike is permanent or not.

The fear of it becoming unbearable. It's almost unbearable now. Imagine it getting even worse . Sometimes I can even calm myself down by thinking of suicide. I just think to myself "Well, if it gets worse I'll just kill myself". That gives me some control back.

I've had a couple of ruff patches in the last 9 years. Mostly the first 3-4 years. A few times I considered suicide for real. Not in the way peaople sometims say "OMG I'm going to kill my self". I was really planing it and even had a suicide note writen.

I never decided on a way to do it though. I only decided in what ways I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't jump of a building or stand infront of a train. It's too messy and traumatizes other people. Plus it would ruin my awsome body haha . The same goes for blowing my head off with a shotgun (even though it might be painless so I didn't rule that one out completely).

I am pleased to hear about your T. getting better. If you're lucky it might vanish completely. It accually does within a year most of the times from what I've heard. I've read a bunch of things one might do in the first year to lower the chances of it getting chonic. Music therapy is one, a supplement called N-acetylcystein (NAC) is another. However NAC should be taken in high doses as soon as possible after exposure (if it's noise induced). So that one might be too late for you but if you want you can try.

I don't know if any of these are really helpful. I didn't get the chance to try them when the time was right for me. There was nothing I could find about this stuff when my T. started.

It's a good thing you found a good doctor. However the Swedish health care system...OMG! You might have heard that it's great and that everything is free. Well it is! However if you want to see a doctor you might die before you get a chance to. When you go to the emergency room you can sometimes wait for almost a whole day before seeing a doctor. I once went with my grandmother to the emergency room here in Gothenburg. We waited for 5 hours with a queue ticket! It ended up with her almost dying becouse her gall bladder was bursting. They got her to the operating table in the last moment and the operation to remove her gall bladder that usually takes between 30-60 minutes took almost 8 hours due to complications.

I'm going to see an audiologist next. I had to wait about three months to get an apppointment with an (E)NT so I guess sometimes around Christmas I might get to see the audiologist.

 

Yeah, it’s sad but tinnitus is a misunderstood problem, because it involves many parts of our body, which are difficult to "heal" : ears, brain...
There is no miracle cure and it’s not the fault of your ENT. I agree yours should have tried to explain your condition a little better, but that’s all, you cannot blame him for not having a cure in the end.

 

I do not blame him. I blame the fact that we are being sent to doctors that don't have a clue just becouse it says "ear" in their title. It's like being sent to a gynecologist becouse your ass hurts.

 

He looks into my ears to see if they're clean. Yeah, like I haven't checked that in nine years!

 

I agree. I don't want to blame my ENT even though he told me (no kidding) that the only way to stop my ringing is to shoot me. LOL. That wasn't funny at my worst time of suffering and I was seeing someone who is supposed to be a specialist on ears. But I do blame the medical school system of training ENT. These guys are not psychologists so they don't know how to counsel you except to deliver you the conclusion in a blunt way. ENTS also don't know alternative treatments for T so they have nothing to refer you to other treatments. They will examine you, test you, then either give you the drugs to fix you, put you on the knife or tell you to live with it. That is their training from the system. May be the psychological aspect of T counselling is never a part of their medical discipline as an ENT. Hope Dr. Nagler can help influence these ENT schools to be more informed about other treatment methods so at least they can say even if I can't help you, here are the options out there and provide some info for their desperate T sufferers. One thing I don't get it is that ENTs must be bombarked by new T patients all these time and they should know they are not able to help the patients most of the time. Don't they have professional associations to discus this inadequacy so that medical schools will better prepare their ENT gradudates for T patients? I think more Tinnitus special treatment centers should be set up with specialists on T treatment. So ENT can refer their patients to see these T specialists much like other specialists.

 

ENTs dont deserve to be called Drs.

 

Yup. It would be like my going to my local ENT to tell me about a cochlear implant. He can't. He knows ears and how they function. I know tinnitus is beyond his knowledge base and wouldn't bother asking him about it. Saying, "I have tinnitus and it's severe," is about all I can do to keep this documented.

My ENT who does cochlear implants is 300 miles away from me. He knows cochlear implants, thank goodness. In terms of tinnitus, he knows what it is and should because it is listed as a possible side-effect of an implant but I wouldn't go to him in an effort to treat it.

There are always specialists in any given medical field. Silvio: Don't expect a regular ENT to understand what's beyond their field. While I'd have a little fun blasting all my ENTs (good ones with maybe one or two nuts tossed in over my lifetime), I can't. They had their specialties. They did what they could.

Silvio: As robinbird suggested and erik is on a similar thought, find a specialist (a second opinion) if you can. Ask the question in advance if the specialist has expertise of any sort in tinnitus.

Take care, blow off steam (we're listening to you), and find a decent doc.

 

You're telling me...All my doctor does is say, we're waiting on the ENT's response...I keep telling them ENT's can't do anything at all, nada...They don't listen though, oh, the holy ENT they surely can do something. NOPE!

 

Oy vey. That's sheer frustration and you're entitled to it. But if anyone on this forum deserves to be ticked off at ENTs, I vote for me. Ear, nose, and throat doctors work within their means. I had one doofus see me - this was sometime around 2000 and I don't remember if I went for a regular cleaning or something else. He seemed
confused and was new to me (and the practice). What I didn't know was he thought he saw what was working its way into a severe ear infection. He made notes (unbeknownst to me) and consulted another ENT andddd forgot to tell me about it. Some WEEKS later, we got a call from his nurse who called repeatedly until my partner nabbed the phone. She didn't think any follow-up was given. She was right. I went to a guy who knew what he was doing. I have no clue as to what this further likely did to my ear.

So, the doofus is an ENT and I reported him. I have other stories but that's enough. There are better ENTs in the sea.