New Here, Not to Tinnitus...

Hi all. Thought I'd do a quick intro post and thank you for sharing your stories on the forum! I have been browsing the past couple of days and learning a lot. I appreciated the shared experiences and look forward to doing what I can to share mine as well!

I have had tinnitus since about 2012. Not sure on the exact year, but I remember when the tinnitus started very clearly for me. I had bad cold, ears started ringing, cold got better...but the tinnitus never went away. Took me a couple of months to realize it wasn't going away.

I have been extremely lucky in that my tinnitus has not altered my life or bothered me significantly until now. I would not say it is a quiet sound, but my tinnitus is very steady-state and a constant mid-high pitch. I have been able to ignore it except when things are quiet. I do need some noise distraction to fall asleep, and it's a little hard for me to focus in quiet rooms and such. But for the most part, I have been living OK without a lot of consequences. Early on I did some googling and found there wasn't a lot to do for it, so I have just been monitoring. Maybe it was dumb I never went for a hearing test, or to the doctor to find some sort of solution, and maybe I should have done more early on. I'm learning more now, that's all I will say.

The past couple of weeks I have started feeling intermittent fullness in my ears - mostly on the left but sometimes right. A bit of pain but more fullness than a plugged or clogged ear feeling if that makes any sense. It comes and goes, and isn't a consistent feeling. But the more worrisome thing is my left ear tinnitus is getting much louder and distracting. It is not consistent, not triggered by anything I can tell, but it's very noticeable and definitely distracting. I'm worried that my dang ears are changing and something bad has started going on in there. Hopefully it is just short-term weirdness and I can get back to my boring steady-state painless tinnitus sooner than later.

I happened to be at a place with low-cost basic hearing screens this weekend and took one because of these new issues. I discovered that I definitely have high-pitch hearing loss on the left side, maybe some milder loss on the right. But need a proper hearing test to find out more, so referrals to ENT and Audiology are in the works. In the meantime I will be lurking and learning on the forum. I am little concerned that autoimmune stuff is at play - I have a high ANA and symptoms consistent with some autoimmune disorders (rashes and very bad sun sensitivity, a bit of joint aching) but nothing severe or definitive enough for a diagnosis. Reading some stories about autoimmune inner ear disease scared me sufficiently to get my butt to the doctor, so if nothing else that high ANA is doing something for me! ;-)