Smoke Detector Went Off Three Times — Covered My Ears Too Fast?

One of my parent's was cooking something and to my dismay, the smoke detector went off three times. The first time I covered my ears with cupped hands and waited for it to go off. The second time, I covered my ears again with cupped hands and went into the walk in closet. The first two times, I didn't cover them too harshly or fast.

However, the third time, I panicked and covered my ears with cupped hands way too fast before finally getting my earmuffs on and walking past the smoke detector.

My ears don't feel full or in pain, but I am paranoid that I may have done a bit of damage to my ears by covering them too fast. There is a bit of a spike in my tinnitus, but nothing too drastic.

I'm mainly concerned that I may have sustained more high-frequency hearing loss from this incident.

Is there any way to help counter the damage this incident may have caused?

 

Sorry to hear of the incident. Some around here would recommend prednisone, although I did not take it after any of my loud noise events.

Some good advice is to do your best to protect from further noise damage as best you can. Sounds less than 85 db can definitely induce further spikes once your ears have sustained this type of event.

For example, I used to go into the garage with the automatic door opener running without any thought. It only registers 79 to 80 db on my phone app, which should be fine theoretically from a NIHL standpoint for vast majority of folks. However, now I let the door open before I go into the garage, and even with ear plugs sounds rather loud to me.

It has taken me months to try and minimize and mitigate as many of these noise exposures as I can, and have accepted that I cannot be protected 24/7. Still, I am thankful for the help here.

 

Man I know the feel... when you get blasted out of nowhere with a super loud noise and then you just worry that it will affect your tinnitus, and yes I know people say "oh yeah your tinnitus then worsen because you are worried, but the fact is, in the past where I did not worry, it did in fact spike my tinnitus, which is why now I do worry that it will... not sure if this makes sense to people reading it but it's my experience.