Idiot Move: Blasted Myself with Soundbar at Best Buy

Very interesting. I have a bottle of Cymbalta in my cabinet from before I even had tinnitus. I remember it being a really rough medication, and I didn't make it past the first few days on it due to the side effects. The only SSRI I've tried since tinnitus is Zoloft which, of course, elevated it.

If you don't mind me asking, which SSRI are you currently taking?

 

Amitriptyline. It might be helping. It's honestly hard to tell. Seems to stop working after a while.

 

Amitriptyline is a tricyclic, isn't it? I think I recall you mentioning to me before that it helped you. Sorry for making you repeat yourself.

 

Do you think you are going to?

 

Depends on if Amitriptyline is in fact helping or worsening. I think I'm trading distortions for sheer ringing on it

 

Yeah, that happens. A long time ago I tried L-Theanine and traded static for a light tone. I didn't bother trying it again, but I've noticed the same thing with Advil or other drugs. The usual tinnitus will just change to something else.

 

Hi @Lane, how’s the experimentation with different dosages coming along?

I’m looking to increase my vitamin D intake as I feel like I’m not getting enough, so I’m glad I came across this post. I was wondering if I should start at a lower dose (2000 IUs) and then slowly increase the dosage to 5000 IUs or can I just go straight to 5000 IUs?

Also with regards to the poopy seeds, are you consuming them by itself or as added component to a meal?

 

Hey @ZFire, I'm not that delicious @Lane you were asking, but I'll just say that with almost any drug/supplement, I tend to think it's a good idea to taper up rather than just whack yourself with a high dose (unless it's recommended to you personally by your doctor or something).

Just a thing I've adopted since 2009, because with tinnitus you learn to tread carefully and become more aware of how things are affecting your body.

Practically every new supplement I introduce, I take a small amount and don't mix it with any other supplement the first few times, then gradually introduce my regular supplements to rule out any contra-indication.

Having said that, I'd make an exception in the case of Vitamin D. My blood tests showed I was extremely deficient in it 7 years ago, so my doctor prescribed me a month of high strength 4000IU liquid pellets to take daily. So my regular doctor obviously didn't see any issue with making such a massive leap.

It's one of the safest supplements out there to be quite frank (but not FRANK ).

Only danger is with overdosing which can lead to hypercalcemia.

Just to make sure that doesn't happen, I'll tell you that the upper limit advised for adults in the UK is 4000IU daily (so what I was taking with the high strength stuff in 2015).

Admittedly I sometimes venture outside of the RDA guidelines with some supplements like NAC and Turmeric; but never by much.

Not sure I'd ever feel comfortable taking 30,000IU of VD3 myself to be honest, but to each their own I guess. When it comes to tinnitus, lack of convention is the norm, because there is nothing conventional about or for it. I mean, some people here were experimenting with Trobalt, enough said.

 

Thanks (also Frank), the rates of vitamin D deficiency just in the US... it's something like 50% of people on average. I’m pretty sure I belong in that category as I know for a fact that I don’t get enough sun. So I’ve been trying to figure out what the right dosage is for me to get my D levels back on track. I think I’ll start at 2000 IUs and increase up to 4000 IU.

I think we are all guilty of doing this especially in the earlier phase of tinnitus and hyperacusis. I’ve done it on multiple occasions too with NAC and CoQ 10.

 

I was on Amitriptyline for nearly 25 years and it was fine----slept like a teenager.

Then I got this huge tinnitus spike (likely from the Moderna COVID-19 booster) in November. I was having trouble sleeping, so I went back on the Amitriptyline.

Maybe I'm just a loopy Boomer (59), but I feel like after 5 weeks on the Amitriptyline, my tinnitus got louder, more metallic sounding, and hissier. Also more difficult to mask. I figured it was the deal I made with the tinnitus Devil to get some sleep.

Then a week ago I woke up to my right ear being full and ringing (which it had not, previously), and I'm freaking out.

So I'm now trying to back off the Amitriptyline. Weird thing is that I was only up to 15 mg, which is a tiny dose.

I'm starting to think we can't take any TCAs or SSRIs without risking big tinnitus spikes.

 

Tricyclics can do that. Anything that increases serotonin has the potential to increase tinnitus. Same happened to me on only 10 mg of Nortriptyline, but it went back down after discontinuing. I was on it for 3 months. Thinking of starting it again actually. Depression is a bitch.

 

It really is a Sophie's Choice, frankly. I need to sleep, and nothing knocks me out like amitriptyline. However, the extra tinnitus in my right ear, the ear fullness, and the louder volume is freaking me out, so I think I just need to get off it.

It is ironic that the types of medications that can help us with anxiety and depression are exactly the types of medications that spike tinnitus. Such an insidious disease...

 

Did you taper off of the drug? If so, what was your schedule (how many weeks, and how much, per week)? I am tapering really slowly from Amitriptyline... I actually use a jewelry scale and go down little by little each week. I seem to be very sensitive to these medications...

 

I just went from 20 mg down to 10 mg and eventually stopped. I didn't follow any regimen given to me. I was really on too low of a dose to have to be concerned with tapering.

 

Good to know, thanks. May I ask your age? I'm 59. I just did a session with Dr. Bruce Hubbard and he thinks tinnitus is really a factor of age and loud sounds, if you are a musician (as I am... or was, anyway...).

 

I'm 37, musician since age 11.

 

Cool. I've been playing guitar for 50 years. Probably a big reason for my current issues. I had 58 pretty good years, at least...

 

I was never depressed before this. I simply enjoyed existing. But it’s truly made me a more caring and empathetic person. I’ve learned a lot on this journey of suffering.

 

I'm 28 and I guess I loved music way too much. I wish I could go back to the past and tell my younger self to turn it down.

 

I have been a guitar player for 61 years. Add competitive shooting and construction tools and I am surprised that I lasted as long as I did. There is a bunch of stuff I would tell my younger self. Oh wait, I didn't listen the first time around. If you're going to be dumb, you better be tough.

George

 

Right there with you, brother. I grew up in the 60's and 70's, when ear plugs were primitive, at best---hardly anyone wore them. I had a bunch of times getting blasted from loud amps (often my own) before I bought a pair of Norton Sonic II earplugs, which took off like 8 dB.

I wish we had the kinds of protection then that we have now.... it might have been a whole different deal for me... but it is what it is.

 

Same deal, George. I played loud guitar, shot guns, used loud saws and such, and it took until 59 to get the major spike in tinnitus. I'm paying for all that stuff now, but honestly, did anyone really tell us about future hearing loss, back in the day, like they can now? Hearing protection, alone, has become amazing, over the years.

Younger folks, today, have a great opportunity to avoid the mistakes that we made, years ago in very different times.

 

Actually, I don't remember anyone telling me to protect my ears back then. I tell kids now but so far, nobody has listened to me. They are still invincible.

George

 

Yeah, I think my mom told me to turn it down a few times. My band was so loud that an old lady heard us from miles away and called the cops on us. They said if we could play a Clapton tune they'd let it go, so we did a bar or two of "Cocaine" and we were cool.

We thought we were so cool because we were so loud. We were idiots, it turns out, and teenage boys haven't evolved any more than we did over the course of 40 years... so I don't even bother to tell these kids to take care of their ears. By the time they are our age, they'll be able to have their hearing regenerated and hardly give it a thought...

 

Interesting. Just been reading up on Dr. Hubbard. Did you end up doing more sessions with him or just the one?

 

I did two sessions with Bruce Hubbard. Bruce is rather a "tough love" kind of guy. He doesn't think we impact our tinnitus in any way (supplements, treatments, medications etc), he believes "let tinnitus do what tinnitus will do."

His main coping strategy is to write a recovery statement and read it to yourself when you're having a rough time.

He's not wrong, of course, but he doesn't hold your hand, nor does he believe in any of the potential treatments (like Dr. Shore). Habituation is the name of the game for Bruce, and it took him 18-24 months.

 

There's an element of this that I agree with. I suppose it's a process of surrender, which ultimately is a psychological one. Not easy in the early stages but perhaps once tinnitus exhaustion sets in it's the next natural step.

This is the side of his story I'm quite interested in because if I'm not mistaken he'd had tinnitus for years but the real problems for him started when hyperacusis also set in. So I'm assuming it was 18-24 months to habituate to that.

My own tinnitus (even the additional loud version) was much easier to live with when I could successfully mask it. But loudness hyperacusis definitely makes life more complicated. I'm 12 months in with this so I guess I'll see what happens over the next 12 months. Hopefully things will improve a little. Anyhow, cheers for the update.

 

Bruce has four tones in one ear and three in the other. He described them to me and they sounded awful.

Somehow, he blocked it out. He may be much stronger than I am. I'm seven months in and for some reason I am really in a tough way, lately.

 

I think it's a very slippery slope to compare strength when we're dealing with a metric that can't even be measured objectively. It also opens the door to victim blaming.

Maybe CBT can help to a degree but perhaps there's no hard and fast rule about how that works on an individual level.

Perhaps the main challenge is finding the right therapist who can offer the right kind of support for people like us who have many years of skin in this game but haven't habituated naturally to the new situation like we did the first time round.