Oh My Ears...

I've had tinnitus 21 yrs this year.
Started from explosion accident, 3kg of chemical plastic explosives exploded 1 meter from me. My both eardrums ruptured immediatly and I had severe other injuries, small piece of stone punctured my right eye but thank God I didnt loose my vision. I was like shot with a shotgun to the face and upper body.

Two weeks after the accident, my hearing was like supermans, I heard a fly from a distance, mosquitos from meters away... amazing. Then after few weeks my hearing went down and tinnitus started. Actually I don't remember how loud it was from the beginning, but 10-15 years ago I was really suffering. My hearing is lowered 25-30% in speech freq. I rarely hear birds singing, grasshoppers never. I don't hear wind, neighbours car, phone ringing from distance etc.

Today I hear very high sound, left ear stronger and changing volume like a heartbeat, but little bit faster. Sometimes it's steady, but all the time very high and left side is much stronger. Some days left is steady high and right is pulsing. Never quiet, ofcourse not.

My right eardrum is fixed with surgery in 2005, they made it all new. There was a hole in my eardrum that didnt heal. Eardrum was quite ok after the operation, but tinnitus was still there, ofcourse.

I'm a diving instructor and in water every week, lot of hours in a pool and open water. One day I noticed that I don't hear tinnitus when I'm underwater with wethood. With my drysuit and dryhood I still hear it, but not so loud. Only place I can escape the tinnitus is underwater world, the place of total silence.
Cold water goes inside my ears next to the eardrum and the same time I equalize the pressure when I'm diving deeper - as you have to do when the ambient pressure increases. And no tinnitus with me underwater. Only me and the silence.
After diving T is always stronger, I have to pay back my loan of silence... but the underwater world is always there waiting for me.

 

Welcome to the forum. Your love of diving for a tinnitus sufferer reminds me of Zoe Cartwright who I looked up as a guiding light during my initial struggle. She was totally deaf at 15 and she has unmaskable T due to her deafness. Yet she loves her life and is fond of diving too. She made a short tinnitus film which contains some scene of her under water. I often wondered why she loves diving so much and your story kind of rings a bell. Lol. There is some magical link between tinnitus and diving. I talked about her story in a lot more detail at the bottom section of page 14 & page 15 of the Positivity Thread, as in here:
The Positivity Thread

 

Interesting - why would be underwater silence T ?

 

I don't know why my tinnitus turns off when I go underwater. Maybe because of the change in temperature in my ear & eardrum.
Water conducts heat 25 x greater than air, so when I dive with wethood or without any hood, my ears get cooler inside and there is heat loss compared to normal. As I told, tinnitus is still with me with dryhood and I think because my ears are dry.
But when I dive deeper with dryhood, to 40-50 meters, I don't hear T. I don't know why. Normally oxygen partial pressure on the dive there is 1.00-1.4. (On the sea level it's 0.21)
Is that the reason - I don't know, but in hyperbaric pressure chambers people don't experience the same, even the partial pressures are much higher, closer to 3.00.